Kate Messner

"A picture book celebration of the act of exploring--and sharing--a book"--

Twelve-year-old Ava finds an old pencil in her family's junk drawer and discovers, during a math test, that it will answer factual questions, so she and her best friend Sophie have a great time--and Ava grows in self-confidence--until the pencil reveals a truth about her family that Ava would rather not know.

Ranger, a golden retriever, could have been a great search-and-rescue-dog except for the squirrels--but one day he unearths a mysterious box and finds himself transported back to the year 1850 where his faithful service is really needed by a family traveling west along the Oregon Trail.

Traveling back in time to a 20th-century expedition to Antarctica, Ranger, the time-traveling golden retriever, befriends a cabin boy working for Captain Robert Falcon Scott and helps them race against rival explorers to reach the South Pole.

This time the mysterious box transports the golden retriever Ranger back to the shipyards of Belfast in 1912, where a ship is being prepared for her maiden voyage, and when he saves young Patrick Murphy from being crushed by falling boards, Ranger expects to be transported home; when he is not, he knows that somehow his job is not finished--but then, Ranger has never heard of the Titanic, and knows nothing of the fate that awaits Patrick, and all...

Ranger the time-traveling Golden retriever was trained for search-and-rescue and even though he did not pass the tests he has used his training on his many trips to help people caught up in disasters; now he has arrived at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001 just as the first plane hits, and he must rescue fifth-graders Risha and Max who are trapped in the wreckage, guide them to safety, and hopefully reunite them with Risha's...

This time the mysterious box that Ranger the Golden retriever found transports him to a Maryland plantation before the Civil War, where he must help a young house slave named Sarah and her younger brother Jesse find their way to the Underground Railroad and North to freedom, before Jesse is sold to a plantation further South.

"On April 15, 1912 an "unsinkable" ship called the Titanic unexpectedly hit an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Right? Wrong! Nobody was really talking about the Titanic being unsinkable until after it sank. The truth is, four different ships wired the Titanic to report icebergs and field ice in the area. But the Titanic never slowed down. In fact, when the Californian warned that it was trapped in ice, the Titanic's wireless...

Challenging popular misconceptions about the actual events behind major historical periods, a fact-first chronicle of the Mayflower voyage and founding of the Plymouth Rock colony reveals how the Pilgrims nearly settled elsewhere, almost had a second ship and only met the Wampanoag months after arriving. -

Fergus, the pet mouse in Miss Maxwell's classroom, stows away in a backpack on a field trip to the museum. He makes a new friend, Zeke, another mouse, who shows Fergus many interesting exhibits, but now he wonders how to get back to school.