Lois Ruby

"If thirteen-year-old Marty Rafner had his way, he’d spend the summer of 1953 warming the bench for his baseball team, listening to Yankees games on the radio, and avoiding preparations for his bar mitzvah. Instead, he has to deal with FBI agents staking out his house because his parents—professors at the local college—are suspected communist sympathizers. Marty knows what happens to communists, or Reds, as his friends call them: They lose their...

Salem, Massachusetts - 1692 Thomas is marked as an outcast the moment he steps off the ship from England. As a Quaker, he's outnumbered and distrusted by Salem's Puritans. And as an orphan without any useful skills, he has nowhere to live and no way to earn his keep. In a stroke of luck-perhaps good, perhaps not-he's taken in by the aged widow Prudence Blevins, who's rumored to be a witch. Patience has tried all her life to be a good Puritan-obedient...

A spunky young girl forms an unlikely friendship with a dying Chinese man while living in a group home For Greta, having light and carefree Hackey hanging around her mom is a lot more fun than having an ordinary dad. But Hackey isn't her father-he's more like a pimp, and no matter how friendly he is, he still treats Greta's mom like dirt. When the situation at home goes from bad to worse, Greta is moved into a home for at-risk children where she meets...

I ask you, why do weird things always happen to me? Thirteen-year-old Dana Shannon is no stranger to intrigue. Not long ago she discovered a skeleton behind a wall in her family's house -- a house in Lawrence, Kansas, that was once owned by a Quaker family, the Weavers. The diary Dana found in the sealed-off room revealed that the skeleton belonged to a runaway slave named Lizbeth Charles. Now Dana's house is a newly refurbished bed-and-breakfast,...

An angry teenager is sucked into a gang of neo-Nazis. Dan shows up on his first day at a new school with long blond hair, John Lennon glasses, and a shy grin that makes every girl in the hallway swoon. But he only has eyes for Laurel, who's in his English class. Laurel stirs feelings in Dan that he never knew existed, and suddenly, he understands love. Soon, he will understand hate as well.   When a gang of violent young men invades the annual Halloween...

A haunting historical mystery based on real life events, told in the alternating points of view of a contemporary girl and a 19th century slave accused of a horrible crime. When Lila and her family visit Laurel Oaks Plantation in Louisiana, her parents and brother scoff at the claim that the house is haunted. But secretly, Lila suspects there are ghostly presences willing to communicate with her, and her alone. One spirit eager to tell her story...