Hattie Big Sky

Splendors and Glooms

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 3 mins)
• By Laura Amy Schlitz
• Narrated By Davina Porter
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Newbery Medal winner Laura Amy Schlitz's gothic novel in the grand Victorian tradition, Spledors and Glooms, is set in London and centered around the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl, who goes missing. Two children realize it is their guardian, a Venetian-born puppeteer and magician, who has kidnapped her and used his dark powers to imprison her mind and body in the form of a puppet and strive to return her to human form.

The Twenty-One Balloons

• UNABRIDGED (3 hrs and 20 mins)
• By William Pene du Bois
• Narrated By Hal Hollings
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Professor William Waterman Sherman just wants to be alone. So he decides to take a year off and spend it crossing the Pacific Ocean in a hot-air balloon the likes of which no one has ever seen. But when he is found after just three weeks floating in the Atlantic among the wreckage of twenty hot-air balloons, naturally, the world is eager to know what happened. How did he end up with so many balloons . . . and in the wrong ocean?

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 1 min)
• By Jacqueline Kelly
• Narrated By Natalie Ross

The summer of 1899 is HOT in Calpurnia Virginia Tate's sleepy Texas town, and there aren't a lot of good ways to stay cool. Her mother has a new wind machine from town, but Callie might just have to resort to stealthily cutting off her hair, one sneaky inch at a time. She also spends a lot time at the river with her notoriously cantankerous grandfather, an avid naturalist. It turns out that every drop of river water is teeming with life - all you have to do is look through a microscope!

Crispin: The Cross of Lead

• UNABRIDGED (6 hrs and 5 mins)
• By Avi
• Narrated By Ron Keith
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In the small 14th-century English village where he has lived his entire life, the boy has grown up with no name of his own, known only as "Asta's son". But when his mother dies, the boy receives both his rightful name, Crispin, and a lead cross, inscribed with a secret that soon has him fleeing for his life.

Kira-Kira

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 29 mins)
• By Cynthia Kadohata
• Narrated By Elaina Erika Davis
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

kira-kira (kee' ra kee' ra): glittering; shining

Glittering. That's how Katie Takeshima's sister, Lynn, makes everything seem. The sky is kira-kira because its color is deep but see-through at the same time. The sea is kira-kira for the same reason. And so are people's eyes. When Katie and her family move from a Japanese community in Iowa to the Deep South of Georgia, it's Lynn who explains to her why people stop them on the street to stare.