Carlie knows she’s got no say in what happens to her. She is in a foster home with two other kids, Harvey and Thomas J, and is just a “pinball being bounced from bumper to bumper. As soon as [she] get settled, somebody puts another coin in the machine and off [she goes] again. But against her will and her better judgment, Carlie and the boys become friends. And all three of them start to see that they can take control of their own lives”.
This book is “a special celebration of the love and joy an adopted child creates for a family. In asking her parents to tell her again about the night of her birth, a young girl relives a cherished tale she knows by heart. Focusing on the significance of family and love, this a unique and beautiful story about adoption and the importance of a loving family”. This book also “speaks to the universal childhood desire to know more about the excitement, awe, love, and sleeplessness that a new baby brings to a family”.
Choco wishes he had a mother, but who could she be? He sets off to find her, asking all kinds of animals, but he doesn’t meet anyone who looks just like him. He doesn’t even think of asking Mrs. Bear if she’s his mother. Then Mrs. Bear starts to do just the things a mommy might do. And when she brings him home, he meets her other children, a piglet; a hippo; and an alligator, and learns that families can come in all shapes and sizes and still fit together.
At age five-and-a-half, Matilda is “knocking off double-digit multiplication problems and blitz-reading Dickens. Even more remarkably, her classmates love her even though she’s a super-nerd and the teacher’s pet”. But everything is not perfect in Matilda’s world. | For starters she has “two of the most idiotic, self-centered parents who ever lived. Then there’s the large, busty nightmare of a school principal, Miss (‘The’) Trunchbull, a former hammer-throwing champion who flings children at will, and is approximately as sympathetic as a bulldozer. Fortunately for Matilda, she has the inner resources to deal with such annoyances: astonishing intelligence, saintly patience, and an innate predilection for revenge”.
Oliver Twist is an orphan who ran away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble. Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters – the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull’s Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.
Orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman. One day, “under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of ‘great expectations.’ This is a gripping tale of crime and guilt and revenge and reward.
Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit and falls in love with him. However, there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?
Little orphan Heidi goes to live high in the Alps with her gruff grandfather and brings happiness to all who know her on the mountain. When Heidi goes to Frankfurt to work in a wealthy household, she dreams of returning to the mountains and meadows, her friend Peter, and her beloved grandfather.