CMS Summer Reading 2015

Rose is obsessed with homonyms. She's thrilled that her own name is a homonym, and she purposely gave her dog Rain a name with two homonyms (Reign, Rein). Not everyone understands Rose's obsessions, her rules, and the other things that make her different. When a storm hits and Rain goes missing Rose has to find her dog, even if it means leaving her routines.

Nick moves into an old Victorian house, and when he opens the door to the attic, he's hit in the head by a toaster. That's just the beginning of his weird experiences with the old junk stored up there. After getting rid of the odd antiques in a garage sale, Nick and his friends discover the objects have extraordinary properties. Nick also figures out that the attic is a vortex, which attracts all sorts of trouble.

When Sand wakes up alone in a long-abandoned castle, he has no idea how he got there. Nothing lives here and nothing grows, except the vicious, thorny bramble that holds Sand prisoner. To survive, Sand does what he knows best--he fires up the castle's forge to mend what he needs. But the things he fixes work better than they should. Is it magic?

Going to school and making new friends while wearing a bulky hearing aid strapped to your chest? That requires superpowers! In this funny, poignant graphic novel memoir, author/illustrator Cece Bell chronicles her hearing loss at a young age and her subsequent experiences with the Phonic Ear, a very powerful--and very awkward--hearing aid.

Kek, an African refugee, is confronted by many strange things at the Minneapolis home of his aunt and cousin, as well as in his fifth-grade classroom, and longs for his missing mother, but finds comfort in the company of a cow and her owner.

A new client hires Lockwood & Co. to be present at the excavation of Edmund Bickerstaff, a Victorian doctor who reportedly tried to communicate with the dead. All goes well until George's curiosity attracts a horrible phantom. Then Bickerstaff's coffin is raided and a strange glass object buried with the corpse has vanished.

When a desperate man in a nondescript black suit asks Carson Fender to deliver a mysterious package for him, the middle schooler discovers there's something going on in his sleepy North Dakota hometown he had never expected--something involving the CIA.

Talia is still reeling from the death of her mother, but is forced to travel with her emotionally distant whale-researcher father to the Arctic for the summer. Everything about life in Churchill feels foreign, including Sura, the Inuit woman caring for Talia. But when Sura exposes her to the tradition of storytelling, she unlocks something buried.

After moving to a new town his freshman year in high school, Alex Myers is happy to win a spot on the varsity team as a quarterback. But he must deal with the idea of not playing for two years since the first-string quarterback is not only a local hero, he is also son of the corrupt head coach.

At night the skimmers fly over the Wall looking for human prey and the people of Weld huddle in their homes. After his two brothers set out through the magic doors in an attempt to find the Enemy and do not come back, young Rye knows that he must follow and find them.

A memoir by illustrator James McMullan, focusing on his life after World War II began, in which, he and his mother moved from one place to another--Shanghai, San Francisco, Vancouver, Darjeeling, and more.

Sneakers in the 1800s were just a canvas upper and a rubber sole. Today athletic shoes are a multi-billion dollar industry. In Sneaker Century, readers will analyze the history of sneakers and their impact on athletics, fashion, culture, and more.