Children's Literature: Realistic Fiction

It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Nothing at all was right. Everything went wrong, right down to lima beans for supper and kissing on TV. What do you do on a day like that? Well, you may think about going to Australia. You may also be glad to find that some days are like that for other people too.

When Mrs. Mack says she will soon be a grandmother, her students realize that teachers have families just like they do! Suddenly everyone in the class wants to share information about his or her own unique family.

Tommy can't wait to start his art class at school. But once there, he is surprised to find rules! His art teacher wants him to copy her drawing, and he wants to create his own. Full color.

Junie B. is the bestest spier in the world. That's 'cause she has sneaky feet. And her nose doesn't whistle when she breathes. But guess what? Junie B. might be real sneaky. And real peeky. But when she spies on her teacher, she could get into real trouble!

David chewed with his mouth open, jumped on the furniture, and he broke his mother's vase. As a result, all David ever heard his mother say was "No, David!"

Friends come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. In Amos McGee's case, all sorts of species, too! Every day he spends a little bit of time with each of his friends at the zoo. But when Amos is too sick to make it to the zoo, his animal friends decide it's time they returned the favor.

Sam Krupnik finally gets to tell his version of life with his big sister, Lowry's popular Anastasia Krupnik.

Faced with the difficulties of growing up and choosing a religion, a twelve-year-old girl talks over her problems with her own private God.

The summer Opal and her father, the preacher, move to Naomi, Florida, Opal goes into the Winn-Dixie supermarket—and comes out with a dog. A big, ugly, suffering dog with a sterling sense of humor. A dog she dubs Winn-Dixie. Because of Winn-Dixie, the preacher tells Opal ten things about her absent mother, one for each year Opal has been alive.

When anything goes wrong at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School, it's sure to have a Herdman behind it. The Herdmans are more than famous-they're outlaws. They smoke cigars, lie, and set fire to things, and that's only when they bother to come to school! Then a school project forces the students to think of compliments for all their classmates-including the Herdmans. Is it possible that behind their outrageous pranks there may be something good about this crazy clan after all?

After his parents separate, Leigh Botts moves to a new town with his mother. Struggling to make friends and deal with his anger toward his absent father, Leigh loses himself in a class assignment in which he must write to his favorite author. When Mr. Henshaw responds, the two form an unexpected friendship that will change Leigh's life forever.

When Claudia decided to run away, she planned very carefully. She would be gone just long enough to teach her parents a lesson in Claudia appreciation. And she would go in comfort-she would live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Eleven-year-old Gilly has been stuck in more foster families than she can remember, and she's disliked them all. So when she's sent to live with the Trotters, Gilly has devised an elaborate scheme to get her real mother to come rescue her. But the rescue doesn't work out, and the great Gilly Hopkins is left thinking that maybe life with the Trotters wasn't so bad ...

Over a few bags of cheese puffs, four friends decide to form a sisterhood and take the vow of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants . . . the next morning, they say good-bye. And then the journey of the pants — and the most memorable summer of their lives — begins.

Chronicles the close friendship between two Japanese-American sisters growing up in rural Georgia during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the despair when one sister becomes terminally ill.

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.