When twelve-year-old Eric's parents are deployed to Iraq, he goes to live with grandparents he hardly knows in a small town in North Dakota, but his grandfather's hostility and the threat of losing the dog he has rescued are too much and Eric runs away.

A retelling of an old tale in which a servant girl's new master insists she use uncommon names for common objects.

While coping with his parents' separation, eleven-year-old Skeet spends most of Spring Break in his skiff on a Florida river, where he finds a manatee shot to death and begins looking for the killer.

Hindered by a fight with her friend Dub and a series of mysterious fires, eleven-year-old Allie investigates the fire seventeen years earlier which claimed the lives of the husband and infant son of a school cafeteria worker, as well as the handsome young man whose ghost asks Allie for help.

A very poor, humble couple live so simple a life they share everything, until the husband discovers a pot with magical powers buried under the very last potato in the garden.

After a thief steals Old Granny's beans while she is asleep at night, she gets some surprising help with catching him.

After stealing a dead man's boots, a poor wandering bagpiper uses them to play a trick on an unfriendly farmer but then finds the trick turned back on him.

Prompted by the ghost of a young Seneca Indian girl, twelve-year-old Allie and her friend Dub are determined, despite the opposition of an unscrupulous property developer, that the historical pageant celebrating the founding of their town tells the truth about the fate of the Seneca people who lived there during the Revolutionary War.

The king offers his daughter's hand in marriage to the young man who can produce three perfect peaches.