Sometimes the messiest stuff and the biggest mistakes can take you someplace wonderful. With the help of their hit TV show, Fixer Upper, the husband and wife team of Chip and Joanna Gaines have transformed the seemingly everyday work of renovating homes and flipping houses in Waco, Texas, into something much more. With their fun personalities, good humor, strong love of family, and unique design style, they've managed to capture the hearts of Americans...

Ahmedi was born just as the war between the mujahideen and the Soviets reaches its peak in Afghanistan. The sounds of gunfire and fighter planes were as normal to her as the sounds of traffic or children playing are to a schoolgirl in America. When she stepped on a land mine on her way to school, she began to learn--slowly--that ordinary people, often strangers, have immense power to save lives and restore hope. She was taken from a childhood in Afghanistan,...

"This is YA nonfiction. It's the memoir of a boy named Sungju who grew up in North Korea and, at the age of twelve, was forced to live on the streets and fend for himself after his parents disappeared. Finally, after years of being homeless and living with a gang, Sungju is reunited with his maternal grandparents and, eventually, his father"-- "Every Falling Star, the first book to portray contemporary North Korea to a young audience, is the intense...

He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But something made her turn around and go back. They met nearly every week for years, and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.

The tale of friendship between two people, one Israeli and one Palestinian, that symbolizes the hope for peace in the Middle East.
"Makes an incredibly complicated topic comprehensible."—School Library Journal
In 1967, a twenty-five-year-old refugee named Bashir Khairi traveled from the Palestinian hill town of Ramallah to Ramla, Israel, with a goal: to see the beloved stone house with the lemon tree in its backyard that he and...

This book examines the life and musical career of Janis Joplin.

"Gary Paulsen portrays a series of life-altering moments from his turbulent childhood as his own original survival story. If not for his summer escape from a shockingly neglectful Chicago upbringing to a North Woods homestead at age five, there never would have been a Hatchet. Without the encouragement of the librarian who handed him his first book at age thirteen, he may never have become a reader. And without his desperate teenage enlistment in...

Honest and heartfelt, frank and funny, Aly's story is enhanced with never-before-published photos, excerpts from the personal journals she's kept since childhood that chronicle memorable moments with her teammates, and hard-won advice for readers striving to rise above challenges, learn to love themselves, and make their own dreams come true.

Seymour Reit, the creator of Casper the friendly ghost, blends fact with fiction in this captivating tale about one woman who dared to go behind enemy lines as a spy for the Union Army.
Canadian-born Emma Edmonds loved the thrill of adventure and chasing freedom, so in 1861 when the Civil War began, she enlisted in the Union Army.
With cropped hair and men’s clothing, Emma transformed herself into a peddler, slave, bookkeeper...

Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir. Arriving at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp, he became separated first from his mother and then his father but managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with...