Barbara O'Connor

Living in the family car in their small North Carolina town after their father leaves them virtually penniless, Georgina, desperate to improve their situation and unwilling to accept her overworked mother's calls for patience, persuades her younger brother to help her in an elaborate scheme to get money by stealing a dog and then claiming the reward that the owners are bound to offer.

After Owen Jester captures an enormous bullfrog, Tooley, and then has to release it, he and two friends try to use a small submarine that fell from a passing train to search for Tooley in the Carter, Georgia, pond he came from, while avoiding Viola, the nosy girl next door.

When her mother uproots them again to another home and takes a job as housekeeper, ten-year-old Mavis is determined to find a best friend in Landry, Alabama, where the summer also holds the promise of friendship and change for a sad man, a stray dog, and a timid girl.

In North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains, a troubled boy and his mother, a happy family seeking adventure, a man and his lonely daughter, and the widow who must sell the run-down motel that has been her home for decades, meet and are transformed by their shared experiences.

Sherman, a one-legged pigeon, sets everyone aflutter in a small southern town.

Martin longs to be a musician, and with the encouragement of two very different friends, he eventually is able to defy his mean-hearted father and accept himself and the talent within him.

A biography of the nineteenth-century Frenchman, accidentally blinded as a child, who created the dot system of reading and writing that is now used by the blind throughout the world.