Zulaikha, a thirteen-year-old girl in Afghanistan, faces a series of frightening but exhilirating changes in her life as she defies her father and secretly meets with an old woman who teaches her to read, her older sister gets married, and American troops offer her surgery to fix her disfiguring cleft lip.

"Stacey's favorite day of the week is Thursday, when the whole class goes to the library and she gets to lose herself in her beloved books. On one of these special days, Stacey discovers that a new student named Julie has trouble reading in English, so they begin sharing books and stories to practice. Soon, more students start to join them. Books take the group on magical adventures and reveal other worlds and cultures--but best of all, they bring...

After realizing that the Underwear Dragon misbehaves only because he cannot read, Sir Cole and his would-be assistant, Claire, are determined to help the fearsome beast.

The three little dragons have agreed to take care of the old wizard's cats while he is away, but their inability to read his instructions causes problems until their friend, the Good Knight, saves the day.

The young man known as Teach secretly learned to read, write, and use numbers growing up alongside the master's son. And although on this Southern plantation these are skills he can never flaunt, Teach doesn't keep them to himself. In the course of a week, he'll teach little ones the alphabet in the corner stall of a stable and hold a moonlit session where men scratch letters in the dirt. He'll decipher a discarded letter bearing news of Yankee soldiers...

JoJo's first night in her own room is interrupted by a lion, then a bear, then a tiger and, while the first two obey her keep out sign, the tiger cannot.

Property Jones and her family are in dire straits when they win a drawing for the greatest bookstore in England but the previous owner was hiding something nearly as big as Property's secret.--

Pema, Jagroop, and Bounce discover media-making tools such as script writing on the Internet and produce a movie to get the news out when the corrupt developers who try to force Jagroop's father to sell the family farm also influence what is broadcast on the local news.

Twelve-year-old Foster McFee and her mother escape from her mother's abusive boyfriend and end up in the small town of Culpepper, West Virginia, where they use their strengths and challenge themselves to build a new life, with the help of the friends they make there.