New Releases by Jane Louise Curry

Poor Tom''s Ghost—dramatic, wholly convincing, a fascinating intermingling of the centuries—portrays a family whose uncertain bonds are tested and strengthened by a threat from the past. When the Nicholas family first sees the derelict old house near London that has been left to them in Aunt Deb''s will, they are sadly disappointed. Thirteen-year-old Roger is the most disappointed, since, having moved place to place all his life with his gifted actor-father, he longs for some measure of stability. Then Roger and his father discover, under peeling wallpaper and rotted paneling, traces of a much older, more graceful house, and their misgivings disappear—until, one night, the house is filled with a sound of wild grieving that Roger traces to an empty room. Only Roger—and later his small stepsister Pippa—sees the ghosts, among them is that of Tom Garland, a well-known actor in Shakespeare''s time. But Roger''s father, playing Hamlet in the famous National Theatre, is caught up, unknowingly, in Tom''s old tragedy. It is a frightened Roger who has to risk his life to find a way to mend the past before the present becomes its tragic echo.

As the child of two musicians, twelve-year-old James has no interest in music until he discovers a portal to seventeenth-century London in his uncle''s basement, and finds himself in a situation where his beautiful voice and the fact that he is biracial might serve him well.

Recounts the experiences of an Ancient Roman girl at the hands of the Etruscan king Larth Porsena.

Retells twenty-six tales from Native Americans whose traditional lands were in Texas and the Southern Plains, and provides a brief introduction to the history of each tribe.

Tee (Leticia) Woodie and her family have moved into a big, old house that is part of her father''s inheritance from Great-uncle Sebastian. While exploring the contents of Sebastian''s antiques-and-junk store, they find a parcel marked "For dear Leticia, my Shabti Box." The decorated box holds a colorful wooded figure of a girl in mummy wrappings.

A collection of twenty tales from the different tribes that are part of the Algonquian peoples who lived from the Middle Atlantic States up through eastern Canada.

In 1842, eleven-year-old twins, whose father runs a boat on the Juniata Canal in Pennsylvania, learn of a Harrisburg bookseller''s plan to steal Charles Dickens''s newly finished novel while Dickens himself is touring the U.S.

Just after moving into their grandmother''s house in Pittsburgh, the five Smith children must uncover a long-standing scam to steal the houses of old people before Grandma Smith loses her home. Sequel to The Big Smith Snatch..

A Sixteen-year-old Prodigy uses his mentor''s invention to go into the past to exorcise his unreturned love for a beautiful girl, and discovers a mystery involving another of the professor''s inventions.

Though two boys are paying attention to her, a seventeen-year-old in East Liverpool, Ohio, is painfully shy until she discovers in herself the eye, hand, and heart of a potter.

Gordy and his friends find secret rooms, mysterious burglaries, and a shadowy villain on the trail of a treasure supposedly lost in Johnstown''s flood of 1889.

When he goes to live with his cousin at the family''s ancestral home, a ten-year-old boy finds a secret room and clues that could help unravel the riddle of the family treasure.

A group of children in a crowded school invent a girl who does not exist and find their prank played back at them in a most unexpected way.

Ten-year-old Felicity''s existence in a dreadful eighteenth-century orphanage, owned and run for profit by Parson Grout, is changed forever when the Parson steals a sturdy wooden cupboard believing it to be magical.

When their farm and everything on it is reduced to miniature by a mysterious machine, Pete and his grandmother do all they can to keep themselves and their farm from being lost forever.

When he exchanges medallions with the boy who appears to be his double, Dave goes back 800 years in time to medieval Wales.

In sixteenth-century Wales, a young girl''s fair hair and lame foot make her suspect to her neighbors who fear that she is a fairy child and capable of magic.

A prophecy inscribed on stone, a bronze Celtic bell, a fabled tree, and a long, straight passageway beneath a hill-threatened by a drilling company and a woman who strangely resembles Morgan Le Fay--lead four children into a stitch in time and to the Sleepers, an early Celtic King Arthur, and his men.

A fantasy about the past and the present, about good and evil.

Legends of the making of California, the theft of Dawn and fire, coyote tales.