Clements, Andrew

Clever fifth-grader Nick Allen, determined to turn his teacher's love of the dictionary around on her, invents a new word and sets off a chain of events that quickly moves beyond his control.

Alec, a sixth-grade bookworm always in trouble for reading instead of listening and participating in class, starts a book club, solely to have a place to read, and discovers that real life, although messy, can be as exciting as the stories in his favorite books.

Second-grader Jake Drake makes it his mission to make the solemn new student teacher smile, but he soon finds that not everyone is impressed by his clown act.

Alec, a sixth-grade bookworm always in trouble for reading instead of listening and participating in class, starts a book club, solely to have a place to read, and discovers that real life, although messy, can be as exciting as the stories in his favorite books.

An usually aloof cat risks her own life to save her owner fom a deadly fire.

Norman, a blind Labrador retriever, saves a girl from drowning in the ocean.

When his older brother gets in serious trouble, sixth-grader Clay decides to change his own mischief-making ways, but he cannot seem to shake his reputation as a troublemaker.

Fifth-grader Nora Rowley has always hidden the fact that she is a genius from everyone because all she wants is to be normal, but when she comes up with a plan to prove that grades are not important, things begin to get out of control.

Sixth-grader Alton Barnes loves maps, and when his portfolio of secret maps is stolen, he begins getting notes with orders he must obey to get the maps back, he might succeed before his teacher, principal, or someone else learns he has been studying and mapping things about them.

As letters flow back and forth--between the prairies of Illinois and the mountains of Afghanistan, across cultural and religious divides--sixth-grader Abby, ten-year-old Amira, and eleven-year-old Sadeed begin to speak and listen to each other.