Eleven-year-old Clay must find a home on the streets of New York City in this award-winning, heartbreakingly honest novel. He was eleven years old, and he had never felt so alone in his life. Clay Garrity lived a normal life until his father lost his job and abandoned the family. Now his pregnant mother has deserted him too, leaving Clay alone in a welfare hotel with a jar of peanut butter and half a loaf of bread. Fearing being placed in foster care, Clay runs away. Alone in the city, Clay wanders down streets with boarded-up buildings and through dark alleys, until he comes to a small triangular park that looks like an island in a stream. In the light of a street lamp, he sees cardboard boxes, blankets, bundles—and people. Some are lying on benches, others inside boxes. Two of the men, Calvin and Buddy, offer to share their shelter, and Clay is grateful to have a place to stay during the bitter November cold. Before long, Calvin, Buddy, and Clay form a family amid the threatening dangers and despair of the streets. Clay knows that leaving the streets and going into foster care means that he may never see his parents again. But if he stays, he may not survive at all. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults, this acclaimed novel offers an intensely moving and candid look at the all-too-real lives of homeless teens.

With the sun shining brightly over their heads, the Scott girls enjoy the warm Florida ocean waters as they carelessly swim along. But Mariah, Leah, Olivia and Gianna are unaware of the adventure that awaits them beneath the wateras surface. On the other side of a secret underwater cave, the girls discover adventure and intrigue as they are thrust into a mystery that only they can help solve. And the inhabitants of an entire island are relying on their help! With each turn the girls meet new and unusual characters as they explore an island that did not even exist to them just moments earlier. Follow along as the Scott girls embark on another daring adventure and learn more lessons on family, forgiveness and fun in The Discovery of Monkey Island!

The Curse of Monkey Island is the rollicking third installment of the popular Monkey Island game series. With features that include punning pirates, vegetarian cannibals, and guys with names like Snugglecakes, LucasArts manages to successfully integrate humor with a compelling story line. This guide helps players solve a variety of puzzles in order to complete the game.

The #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe and National Geographic: acclaimed journalist Douglas Preston takes readers on a true adventure deep into the Honduran rainforest in this riveting narrative about the discovery of a lost civilization -- culminating in a stunning medical mystery. Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.

That was the only target set for those 20 or so young, ambitious, hilarious and unkempt creators. Lucasfilm GamesTM, soon to be LucasArtsTM, would become a legendary developer, not least because it was within its walls that The Secret of Monkey IslandTM was created in 1990. The best-known of the Point & Click adventure games, Monkey Island earned its reputation from its world of colorful, delightfully anachronistic pirates, its trademark Monty Python-style humor, and, quite simply, the fact that it revolutionized a genre. This book is an homage to the adventures of Guybrush ThreepwoodTM, pirate extraordinaire. But it also aspires—quite ambitiously—to explain why Monkey Island marks a pivotal milestone in the way stories are told through video games. It’s also an opportunity to look back at the tumultuous history of LucasArts and Telltale Games, to discover some voodoo grog recipes, to learn interactive pirate reggae songs, to impress at a party of 40-year-old geeks, and to discover one-liners as sharp as a cutlass (great for duels and birthdays).

Mary Francis Colt loved her job working as a secretary for John Fulton, public defender. For a girl growing up in Lakeview, a small Florida town in the turbulent 1960s, it was a solid opportunity for a better life. Mary Francis dreamed of bigger and better things. But that all comes crashing down when she is kidnapped by Bonelle Jackson, the irrational and dangerous mother of two men her boss helped sent to jail. When their mothers plot to break them out of jail is foiled and one of the sons is killed by police, Bonelle brutally murders the innocent Mary Francis and abandons her mutilated body in the swamps. Soon, law enforcement officials are hot on the manhunt for the escaped convicts and their murderous mother. Benji Goldman and Charlie Pepper become involved when they discover the body of Junebug Black floating in the water off of Monkey Island in Lake Harris. Now they must determine if these two murders relatedbefore another person winds up dead.