The kids from The Egypt Game are back. What game will they play next? The answer is Gypsies. While April plunges in with her usual enthusiasm, the more Melanie learns, the more something seems to be holding her back. But it's Toby who adds a really new wrinkle when he announces that he himself is a bona fide Gypsy. Plus he can get them some of his grandmother's things to use as real Gypsy props for the new game. What could be more thrilling? Then Toby suddenly and mysteriously disappears, and the kids discover that living as real-life Gypsies may not be as much fun as they thought. How will they find Toby and rescue him from the very real problems that are haunting his life?
The first time Melanie Ross meets April Hall, she’s not sure they have anything in common. But she soon discovers that they both love anything to do with ancient Egypt. When they stumble upon a deserted storage yard, Melanie and April decide it’s the perfect spot for the Egypt Game. Before long there are six Egyptians, and they all meet to wear costumes, hold ceremonies, and work on their secret code. Everyone thinks it’s just a game until strange things start happening. Has the Egypt Game gone too far?
DIVAll Gib ever wanted was to be adopted, but life with a family isn’t quite what he thought it would be/divDIV Gib was sent to an orphanage when he was six years old, and with each year, he knows it becomes less likely that he will be adopted into a loving family. As kids get older, they are more likely to be adopted onto a farm, meaning a hard life of unpaid labor. And after seeing a friend come back battered and near death, Gib is understandably worried./divDIV /divDIVWhen his turn for adoption finally comes, Gib is surprised to learn that life on the farm isn’t too difficult. His new “parents,” the Thorntons, are kind to him, and his job in the stables is fun and interesting. It is as close to the home of his dreams as he could possibly imagine. And though Gib doesn’t remember much of his past before the orphanage, as time passes, Gib realizes that his new family may be more connected to his real family than he ever imagined. This smart, touching novel is based on the life of author Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s father and his experience as an orphan in the 1900s./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an extended biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder./div
Though vampires have their intrigues, werewolves have their wars, mages have their realities, wraiths have their passions and changelings seek to return to their homeland, there are supernatural powers at work in the world that concern all of these beings. Indeed, there are people and forces in the world of Darkness that endanger all those who exist. Learn the secrets, alliances, enemies and plans of these shadowy beings in a series of world of Darkness books that can be integrated into all of the storyteller games. Learn the secrets the Rom in the World of Darkness.
Is the chance to serve as an extra for Hitler’s favorite filmmaker a chance at life — or a detour on the path to inevitable extermination? One ordinary afternoon, fifeen-year-old Lilo and her family are suddenly picked up by Hitler’s police and imprisoned as part of the "Gypsy plague." Just when it seems certain that they will be headed to a labor camp, Lilo is chosen by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to work as a film extra. Life on the film set is a bizarre alternate reality. The surroundings are glamorous, but Lilo and the other extras are barely fed, closely guarded, and kept in a locked barn when not on the movie set. And the beautiful, charming Riefenstahl is always present, answering the slightest provocation with malice, flaunting the power to assign prisoners to life or death. Lilo takes matters into her own hands, effecting an escape and running for her life. In this chilling but ultimately uplifting novel, Kathryn Lasky imagines the lives of the Gypsies who worked as extras for the real Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, giving readers a story of survival unlike any other.
"Fierro doesn't just observe, she knows. Like all great novelists, she gives us the world." - Amy Bloom, bestselling author of Away and Lucky Us It is the summer of 1992 and a gypsy moth invasion blankets Avalon Island. Ravenous caterpillars disrupt early summer serenity on Avalon, an islet off the coast of Long Island--dropping onto novels left open on picnic blankets, crawling across the T-shirts of children playing games of tag and capture the flag in the island's leafy woods. The caterpillars become a relentless topic of island conversation and the inescapable soundtrack of the season. It is also the summer Leslie Day Marshall—only daughter of Avalon’s most prominent family—returns with her husband, a botanist, and their children to live in “The Castle,” the island's grandest estate. Leslie’s husband Jules is African-American, and their children bi-racial, and islanders from both sides of the tracks form fast and dangerous opinions about the new arrivals. Maddie Pencott LaRosa straddles those tracks: a teen queen with roots in the tony precincts of East Avalon and the crowded working class corner of West Avalon, home to Grudder Aviation factory, the island's bread-and-butter and birthplace of generations of bombers and war machines. Maddie falls in love with Brooks, Leslie’s and Jules’ son, and that love feels as urgent to Maddie as the questions about the new and deadly cancers showing up across the island. Could Grudder Aviation, the pride of the island—and its patriarch, the Colonel—be to blame? As the gypsy moths burst from cocoons in flocks that seem to eclipse the sun, Maddie’s and Brooks’ passion for each other grows and she begins planning a life for them off Avalon Island. Vivid with young lovers, gangs of anxious outsiders; a plotting aged matriarch and her husband, a demented military patriarch; and a troubled young boy, each seeking his or her own refuge, escape and revenge, The Gypsy Moth Summer is about love, gaps in understanding, and the struggle to connect: within families; among friends; between neighbors and entire generations.
Herman Jackson chose St. Paul as his place of permanent exile from Detroit after his former life as a bookie got too hot. Now he leads a respectable, low-profile life as a bail bondsman, selling second chances to losers and looking over his shoulder. When a young woman named Amy Cox leaves Jackson a priceless antique violin as security for her brother's bail bond, it's really the beginning of an elaborate con game. But the game has barely begun when she is murdered in front of Jackson's office. And for reasons that make no sense, the police are calling him the prime suspect... unless he gives them the violin as evidence. With his criminal past, Jackson can't afford to be a prime suspect for jaywalking. But he is also not prepared to give in to extortion. Soon he is on the run, trying to solve Amy Cox's murder, pursued by one real and one crooked cop, a band of urban Gypsies, and an unknown killer who also wants Jackson dead. Then the violin, reputed to carry a 400-year-old curse, takes on a life of its own.
'Whom do I look like? I mean, whom do you take me for? . . . Who is Sylvia?' He was silent for so long she thought he wasn't going to answer. An odd expression came into his face. He turned away as if to hide it, then, looking back over his shoulder, said, 'My sister. But she's dead.' Emily hadn't meant to get tangled up with the likes of Oliver Mallerton and his dead sister. She had only been tailing her artist father to find out why he had been acting so mysterious lately. She certainly never meant to get mixed up in the Sylvia Game, a game that sounded harmless, not like a game that would nearly cause the death of one boy and lead to the banishment of another.
A runaway slave with a shadowy past, sixteen-year-old Persephone has spent four long years toiling beneath the leering gaze of her despised owner and dreaming of a life where she is free to shape her own destiny. Then, one night, a chance encounter with a handsome chicken thief named Azriel changes her life forever. Sold to him for a small bag of gold coins, Persephone soon discovers what she already suspected: namely, that Azriel is not what he seems. And when she realizes that he believes Persephone has a special destiny—she is determined to escape him and his impossibly broad shoulders. But things are no longer as simple as they once were. Torn between her longing for freedom and her undeniable feelings for the handsome thief with the fast hands and the slow smile, Persephone faces the hardest choice she will ever have to make. And no one—least of all her—could have imagined the shocking truth her decision will reveal.
