Pinocchio, a wooden puppet full of tricks and mischief, with a talent for getting into and out of trouble, wants more than anything else to become a real boy, but first he must learn to be truly unselfish.

"How to introduce kids to Shakespeare--not just to the stories behind the plays but to the richness of his language and the depth of his characters. That's the challenge that Leon Garfield, a wonderful children's book writer, undertook to meet in his monumental and delightful Shakespeare Stories. Here are twenty-one of the Bard's plays, presented in what is not a series of dry retellings, but rather a refashioning of the dramas as stories, in a way...

Life in their rented summer cottage on Seacrow Island is sometimes happy, sometimes exciting, and sometimes tragic, but never uneventful for a Swedish author, his three sons, and nineteen-year-old daughter.