Showing results by author "Bruce Coville" in All Categories

A story described by Katherine Paterson as "didactic camp", a very funny but also thought-provoking fantasy about the issue of gayness. This controversial tale has given enormous comfort to many young people struggling with their own sexual identity.

The story begins when Susan Simmons returns to school from spring vacation. Susan has been looking forward to the big class play her teacher has been planning. But to her dismay Ms. Schwartz is gone... replaced by tall, handsome Mr. Smith, a strictly "by the book" teacher with some very strange habits. Investigating her new teacher, Susan makes a shocking discovery: "Mr. Smith" is actually an alien named Broxholm who is planning to abduct five students.

On a snowy night, Cara and her grandmother are pursued into St. Christopher's church by an unknown man. Clutching her grandmother's mysterious amulet, and following the old woman's instructions, Cara escapes their pursuer and falls into Luster, the world of the unicorns.

The first of Bruce Coville's acclaimed "Oddlies". This collection of stories is performed by some of Full Cast's favorite narrators (including Bruce himself). Some are funny, some are scary, some are both. The topics range from unicorns to werewolves, vampires to angels to brownies.

In the center of Luster towers an enormous tree that is the Heart of the World. Now the tree is wounded, pierced by a tunnel that connects it to Earth. Through that tunnel strides Beloved, the ancient enemy of the unicorns, followed by an army of Hunters eager to destroy every last unicorn. At the center of this great struggle is the human girl, Cara Diana Hunter, who sets out with her friend, the gryphon Medafil, to ask a dragon to aid the unicorns.

The whole situation began when Duncan Dougal was hiding out in a dumpster (it’s a long and smelly story). Stuck in the garbage, he discovered proof that even though the kids drove off the alien named Broxholm the year before, there is still an alien-in-disguise working as one of their seventh-grade teachers! But which teacher is it? That’s the mystery Duncan must solve to protect the school - and himself.

Nina ("Nine") Tanleven and her best buddy Chris Gurley are having a hard time. The play that led to them meeting a ghost and unraveling a mystery has ended. Now the rest of the summer looms ahead, looking dull after their great adventure. Luckily, Nine's dad gets a job designing the restoration...

One stormy night, sixth-grader Jacob Doolittle finds a baby in a basket on his front porch. To Jake's surprise, his mother decides to care for the baby, hoping its mother will return. However that surprise is nothing compared to what happens to "Little Dumpling" the first time there's a full moon….

For sixth-grader Nina Tanleven, trying out for a part in a play is pretty scary. But nothing can compare to seeing a ghost, a woman in white, sitting in the audience! Nina senses that she has nothing to fear from this apparition, but she is intrigued. Nina learns that 50 years ago, a beautiful actress was murdered - on this very stage! According to legend, she has haunted the theater ever since.

As if she didn't have trouble enough after her classmates discovered she had worn her brother's underwear to school (oh, the teasing, the humiliation!), Jennifer Murdley has just stumbled into Mr. Elives' Magic Shop, where she buys a toad named Bufo. Of course the odds of buying a normal toad in that shop are zero, as Jennifer finds out when Bufo starts to talk to her. As it turns out, talking is the least of the toad's strange talents.

In the third volume of the Unicorn Chronicles, Cara Diana Hunter journeys to the Valley of the Centaurs in quest of a mysterious lost story that could hold the key to the survival of the unicorns.

When the messiest kid in Minnesota is saddled with her family's obsessively tidy brownie, the sparks are sure to fly. Warning: you may not want to listen in public, since this story will have you laughing out loud!

Luster, the world where the unicorns fled to escape the Hunters who have sworn to wipe them out, has dangers of its own - as Cara discovers when she attempts to cross that world in a desperate effort to rescue her grandmother. Each stage of Cara's journey brings new peril, wondrous new characters, and new clues to the mystery of her grandmother's past. And through it all threads the haunting melody of the "Song of the Wanderer."

The first day of seventh grade is probably the worst day of Duncan Dougal's life. He knows that things are really bad when he finds an alien's hand in a Dumpster and then gets plugged into an alien brain fryer! Can Duncan find out which of the four new teachers in his school is an alien before his brains get fried to a pulp - or before the aliens try to fry the whole planet?

The Return of a Beloved Ghost-Mystery Series! When Nina (“Nine”) Tanleven earns a spot in a new musical to be mounted in Syracuse's beautiful-but-spooky Grand Theater, she expects that she will be in for a lot of fun and a lot of hard work. What she does not expect is that she will find a...

"A page turner that will keep mystery buffs reading to the frightening climax and satisfactory conclusion."—School Library Journal Why does the ghost of a little girl haunt a bedroom in the old Watson House? When Nina ("Nine") Tanleven gets a part-time job at Norma Bliss's antique shop, she...

Purple and perplexed, Pleskit Meenom needs advice on how to deal with the challenges of his new life on Earth. Normally he would ask his best friend, Tim Tompkins, but the two boys have been tricked into a feud. So instead he turns to his Grandfatherly One - or, at least, the brain of that wise old man, which is all the family has left of him. But perhaps the Grandfatherly One is not as wise as they all would like to believe, since he convinces Pleskit to take him to school in the portable Brain Transport Device. And that's when things really start to go wrong.

It's not easy being the only kid in your class who doesn't have six arms and an extra eye in the middle of your forehead. But that's the situation Jacob faces when his dad takes him to the planet Kwarkis. The situation gets worse when Jacob makes a ghastly blunder that just may cost him the thing he loves most.

This rib-tickling new novel was inspired by the old Norse poem The Thrymskvitha which tells what happens when Thor's hammer is stolen and he has to dress as a bride to retrieve it. Told by Thialfi the goatboy, and featuring Norse gods, foolish giants, and a pair of cranky goats, this one will have the whole family laughing out loud.

Benjie Perkins' parents make their living by buying old houses and fixing them up to sell, so Benjie is used to odd noises in the night. But this time, it's different. This time what he hears is the ghost of Elvira Thistledown, who is kept from moving on to glory by a truly strange curse. Can Benjie free her restless spirit?