Kathi Appelt

The lives of four characters, including cemetery thief Cade Curtis, a runaway slave, and an illegally captured ocelot, flow together across time through their connections to the Houston bayou and an angel carved from Georgia marble.

On the night of the blue moon when mermaids are said to gather on a sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico, ten-year-old Keeper sets out in a small boat, with her dog BD and a seagull named Captain, determined to find her mother, a mermaid, as Keeper has always believed, who left long ago to return to the sea.

An old hound that has been chained up at his hateful owner's run-down shack, and two kittens born underneath the house, endure separation, danger, and many other tribulations in their quest to be reunited and free.

Max the cat attacks fish, curtains, socks, and strings, but how many things can he actually catch?

While preparing for a visit from some relatives--and even after they arrive--Bubba and Beau want nothing more than to sink their paws into the squishy, squashy mud hole.

When Mamma Pearl washes their favorite blanket it's a sad day for best friends Bubba and Beau, but it gets worse when she decides the baby boy and his puppy need baths, too.

A busy crow flies around town picking up all kinds of discarded items and uses them to create a beautiful Christmas tree.

In 1910, Zada the camel treks across the West Texas desert to save two baby kestrels from an approaching haboob, a mountain-sized storm, sharing adventures from her youth in Turkey to keep them calm.

A collection of poems about the experiences of young people and a section with information about how each poem was written to enable readers to create their own original poems.

Pigs dance the night away when a polka band plays at the annual hootenanny. It's the yearly hootenanny for piggies all across the holler. They're hankerin' for a porky polka rhythm--plus a piggy rigadoon, a piggy roundelay, and, of course, a piggy mosh pit! Illustrations and rhythmic rhymes introduce musical styles and instruments to the youngest readers.