Julia Durango

"A little boy promises his beloved friend, an elderly lady, that one day he will fix up her old house--and his words inspire the other people in the neighborhood to pitch in and get it done."--

Contains poems about the different people who stop by Marisol's father's music store on a hot summer night, looking for just the right songs to make their hearts fly home.

"Zeus would rather be anywhere than here--Buffalo Falls, the tiny town his family moved to at the end of the school year. Having left all his friends back in Chicago, and with nothing to look forward to except helping out at his mother's cafe and biking around town with his weird little brother, Zeus is pretty sure this is destined to be the worst summer of his life." --

In beauty, talent and skills, the housefly can't compete with other bugs. But as a pest he is a winner, Book shows beetle, firefly, cricket, cicada, housefly and spider.

At bedtime, a young boy looks forward to falling asleep and dreaming about sailing the ocean of stars with his father.

Thirteen-year-old Calepino, an African slave in the seventeenth-century Caribbean city of Cartagena, works as a translator for a Jesuit priest who tends to newly-arrived slaves and, after working for a Jewish doctor in a leper colony and helping an Angolan boy and his mother escape, he realizes his true calling.