4.8/5 Aliens Ate My Homework ­ Coville, Bruce. Rod Allbright literally cannot tell a lie. So, when his teacher asks what happened to his math assignment, Rod has to make the only answer he can: "Aliens ate my homework, Miss Maloney!" No one believes him, so they don't ask why aliens are here. That's just as well, since he is sworn to silence about their secret mission and the fact that he has been drafted to help them!

4.2/2 Bunnicula ­ Howe, Deborah. Chester the cat tries to warn his human family that their rabbit must be a vampire.

4.4/8 Ella Enchanted ­ Levine, Gail Carson. In this novel based on the story of Cinderella, Ella struggles against the childhood curse that forces her to obey any order given to her.

4.6/6 The Devil's Arithmetic ­ Yolen, Jane. Hannah resents the traditions of her Jewish heritage until time travel places her in the middle of a small Jewish village in Nazi-occupied Poland.

5.4/2 Frindle ­ Clements, Andrew. When he decides to turn his fifth grade teacher's love of the dictionary around on her, clever Nick Allen invents a new word and begins a chain of events that quickly moves beyond his control.

3.8/1 The Good, the Bad, and the Goofy ­ Scieszka, Jon. The Time Warp Trio find themselves in the Wild West of yesteryear, rubbing elbows with cowboys and Indians.

5.7/7 Hatchet ­ Paulsen, Gary. After a plane crash, thirteen-year-old Brian spends fifty-four days in the wilderness, learning to survive initially with only the aid of a hatchet given by his mother, and learning also to survive his parents' divorce.

3.7/1 It's All Greek to Me ­ Scieszak, Jon. Fred, Sam, and narrator Joe are innocently performing a school play about Mount Olympus when "The Book" (a magic tome so dangerous it had been locked away) whirls them into the Greek underworld. Armed with little but a fake thunderbolt and a spray-painted golden apple, they find themselves at the gates of Hades, confronting a slavering, three-headed, not at all mythical Cerberus. After a lucky escape, they get to the "real" Olympus only to be embroiled in an increasingly dangerous series of disagreements with the cheeky, wise-cracking, bickering immortals. Will they ever find "The Book" on Olympus, as they must in order to get safely back to opening night?

3.8/2 Journey ­ MacLachlan, Patricia. When their mother goes off, leaving her two children with their grandparents, they feel as if their past has been erased until Grandfather finds a way to restore it to them.

4.7/3 The Kid Who Ran For President ­ Gutman, Dan. Judson Moon is a twelve-year-old boy who runs for the Presidency of the United States.

4.7/5 Maniac McGee ­ Spinelli, Jerry. After his parents die, Jeffrey Lionel Magee's life becomes legendary, as he accomplishes athletic and other feats which awe his contemporaries.

5.2/6 My Side of the Mountain ­ George, Jean Craighead. Sam Gribley is tired of living in a crowded Nw York City apartment, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountain wilderness to forge a life of his own. No one takes his plans seriously--except Sam himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he must rely on his own ingenuity and on the resources of the land to survive. And survive he does. Alone in the mountains, Sam learns about courage, danger, and the true meaning of companionship, and captures it all in his journal.

3.6/4 Nothing but the Truth ­ Avi. A ninth-grader's suspension for singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" during homeroom becomes a national news story.

4.9/8 Running Out of Time ­ Haddix, Margaret Peterson. When a diphtheria epidemic hits her 1840 village, thirteen-year-old Jessie discovers it is actually a 1996 tourist site under unseen observation by heartless scientists, and it's up to Jessie to escape the village and save the lives of the dying children.

4.9/2 Seedfolks ­ Fleischman, Paul. One by one, a number of people of varying ages and backgrounds transform a trash-filled inner-city lot into a productive and beautiful garden, and in doing so, the gardeners are themselves transformed.

4.9/5 Sign of the Beaver ­ Speare, Elizabeth George. Left alone to guard the family's wilderness home in eighteenth-century Maine, a boy is hard-pressed to survive until local Indians teach him their skills.

5.0/4 Something Upstairs ­ Avi. When he moves from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island, Kenny discovers that his new house is haunted by the spirit of a black slave boy who asks Kenny to return with him to the early nineteenth century and prevent his murder by slave traders.

4.7/4 Stonewords: A Ghost Story- Conrad, Pam. Zoe discovers that her house is occupied by the ghost of an eleven-year-old girl, who carries her back to the day of her death in 1870 to try to alter that tragic event.

4.2/5 Trapped in Death Cave ­ Wallace, Bill. A posthumous letter referring to buried treasure convinces Gary that his grandfather did not die a natural death and, with his friend Brian, he sets out to find both the treasure and his grandfather's killer.

4.2/2 Tut, Tut ­ Scieszka, Jon. The Time Warp Trio is back, and up to hieroglyphic high jinks in the land of pyramids and Pharoahs! When Joe's sister Anna accidently opens The Book, Joe, Sam, and Fred suddenly find themselves in anacient Egypt. Soon the Time Wqrpers are dodging crocodiles on the Nile, outwitting the evil high priest, and searching for an escape route from the mummy-making chamber. Can their new friend Thutmose III, the boy king, help them?

5.2/9 The Watsons Go to Birmingham ­ Curtis, Christopher Paul. The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.

5.0/4 Weasel ­ DeFelice, Cynthia. Weasel is a man the government has sent to drive off the Indians. Weasel has his own ideas about removal...Now that the Shawnees are dead or have left, Weasel has turned on the settlers. He hunts by night and sleeps by day, and he kills for the sport of it. I can't wait for the law to take care of men like Weasel...