Books published by publisher Laurel Leaf Library

How can you be best friends with someone who keeps secrets from you—important secrets?Stephanie’s best friend is Rachel. Since second grade they’ve shared everything, good and bad. Now, as they start seventh grade, Stephanie meets Alison, who has just moved to their neighborhood. Stephanie hopes all three of them can be best friends, because she really likes Alison. But is it possible to have two best friends? Or is it true that two’s company, three’s a crowd?

Find yourself in another world in The Transall Saga, the latest adventure from Gary Paulsen:Mark's solo camping trip to the desert begins as any other camping trip, until a mysterious beam of light appears. The trip turns into a terrifying and thrilling adventure when the light beam transports Mark into another time, and what appears to be another planet! Although he is searching for his way back to earth, in the meantime he is forced to make a life in this unknown world. He meets primitive tribes and shares the joy of human bonds, but this end of isolation in the new world also brings war and a struggle for power.

The inspirational story of the Japanese national campaign to build the Children's Peace Statue honoring Sadako and hundreds of other children who died as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima.Ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Sadako Sasaki died as a result of atomic bomb disease. Sadako's determination to fold one thousand paper cranes and her courageous struggle with her illness inspired her classmates. After her death, they started a national campaign to build the Children's Peace Statue to remember Sadako and the many other children who were victims of the Hiroshima bombing. On top of the statue is a girl holding a large crane in her outstretched arms. Today in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, this statue of Sadako is beautifully decorated with thousands of paper cranes given by people throughout the world.

Jessica isn't your average teenager. Though nobody at her high school knows it, she's a published author. Her vampire novel Tiger, Tiger has just come out under the pen name Ash Night. Jessica often wishes she felt as comfortable with her classmates as she does among the vampires and witches of her fiction. She has always been treated as an outsider at Ramsa High.But two new students have just arrived in Ramsa, and both want Jessica's attention. She has no patience with overly friendly Caryn, but she's instantly drawn to handsome Alex, a cocky, mysterious boy who seems surprisingly familiar. If she didn't know better, she'd think Aubrey, the alluring villain from Tiger, Tiger had just sprung to life. That's impossible, of course; Aubrey is a figment of her imagination. Or is he?Nail-bitingly suspenseful, here is the deliciously eerie follow-up to In the Forests of the Night, by the remarkable fifteen-year-old novelist Amelia Atwater-Rhodes.

"An exciting novel of suspense, based on a fight to the finish between an honest and courageous young man and a cynical business tycoon who believes that anything can be had for a price."--Horn Book. An ALA Best of the Best Books for Young Adults, Edgar Allan Poe Mystery Writers Award, A New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year, New York Public Library--Books for the Teen Age.

IRENE GUT WAS just 17 in 1939, when the Germans and Russians devoured her native Poland. Just a girl, really. But a girl who saw evil and chose to defy it.“No matter how many Holocaust stories one has read, this one is a must, for its impact is so powerful.”—School Library Journal, StarredA Book Sense Top Ten PickA Publisher’s Weekly Choice of the Year’s Best Books A Booklist Editors Choice

Though written more than a century ago, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s beautiful sonnet rings true today for three young couples who believe in the power of love. In “Night Vision,” Brett finds a way to brighten a special girl’s lonely existence. “Bobby’s Girl” features Dana, who must choose between two brothers, both of whom she loves. “Laura’s Heart,” the third story, introduces 16-year-old Laura Carson, who is hospitalized on a regular basis because of her weak heart. But when tragedy strikes a loved one, she realizes her heart is stronger than she thought and that love lives on forever.

Two perennial classics--William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and the Broadway musical West Side Story--in a single volume!The tragedy of love thwarted by fate has always intrigued writers. In the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare took this theme and fashioned one of the world's great plays: Romeo And Juliet. In our own time, Shakespeare's drama has been used as a basis for the overwhelmingly successful musical play West Side Story. Though one of these works is set among the nobility of Verona, and the other among immigrant families of New York's West Side, both tell the story of the plight of young star-crossed lovers.