Lawn Boy by Gary Paulsen

Day one: Your birthday. Money's a little tight in the family right now, and you're trying to figure out how to get the money so you can replace the wheel on your bike. Then your grandmother gives you your grandfather's old mower for a birthday present. While you're fiddling with it, someone asks you if you mow lawns, and offers you forty dollars to do theirs.

Day two: Somebody else asks you to mow their lawn. Then somebody else. Then somebody else. Then you meet Arnold. He'd like you to mow his lawn, but he can't pay you. He's a stockbroker, and he'll put the forty dollars into stocks for you instead. Is that okay? Sure, you say; why not?

Day four: You're doing three lawns a day, seven days a week, and you've still got people asking you to come and mow theirs. Enter Pasqual and Louis, who help out with the work, Louis mowing and Pasqual doing the edging and other finishing touches.

Day fourteen: You are now employing fifteen people to mow lawns all around the neighborhood. You're not even doing the mowing yourself anymore, you're so busy keeping track of the lawns mowed and the money paid. Oh, and Arthur just said, hey, remember that forty dollars I invested for you, you know, in the stocks? Well, a lot of stuff happened and... you now own fifty thousand dollars.

Fifty. Thousand. Dollars.

You can buy a whole lot of bike tires with that.

But what about all those people you're employing to mow lawns? And what about Rock and his buddies, who are threatening to take over your business? For that matter, what are you going to do about Joey Pow?

Oh, yeah. And how about this big question:

How are you going to tell your parents?

The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs

Rose Rita Pottinger is about to have a horrible summer.

Her best friend, Lewis, is going away to boy scout camp, leaving Rose Rita (a girl, and thus not allowed to go along) alone all summer with nothing to do and no one to play with. Rose Rita feels betrayed and angry, but there's nothing she can do about it.

Then a friend offers an alternative to a boring summer: Mrs. Zimmerman has just gotten a letter informing her that her cousin has left her a farm up near Petoskey, and she invites Rose Rita to come with her to look over the farm, sign some papers, and then spend a few weeks driving around the Upper Peninsula.

But there's more to it than just a road trip, you see, for Mrs. Zimmerman is an honest-to-goodness witch, and her cousin has left her not only the farm but also a magic ring he discovered. Unfortunately, when Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmerman arrive at the farm, they find that it has been ransacked, practically torn to pieces, and the ring is gone.

And then strange things start happening... strange sounds, faces appearing, shadows in the night... and Mrs. Zimmerman begins to act oddly. Very oddly indeed...

------------

P.S. There are actually two books that take place before this one which you might want to read first: The House with a Clock in Its Walls and The Figure in the Shadows.

The Liberation of Gabriel King by K. L. Going

Gabriel is scared of many things, but mostly he is scared of starting fifth grade. Fifth and sixth graders share the same cafeteria and recess time and that will not bode well for Gabriel.

When he misses his fourth grade class graduation because some fifth grade bullies tie him up, he decides he isn’t going to move up to fifth grade. What he doesn’t count on is his best friend Frita’s determination that he will start fifth grade with her in the fall.

She decides Gabriel needs to be liberated from his fears. In order for him to be liberated, he must face and overcome each of his fears. To start with, she decides he should have a pet spider in order to overcome his fear of them.

Against the backdrop of a small Georgia town in the summer of 1976, the children find out that some things, like spiders, aren’t really that scary, while some things like grown-ups can be very frightening.

The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer

More slowly I wrote another note, one that would soon wing for miles via wire to be printed out by a teletype machine as:

LADY EUDORIA VERNET HOLMES MISSING SINCE YESTERDAY STOP PLEASE ADVISE STOP ENOLA HOLMES

I directed this wire to Mycroft Holmes, of Pall Mall, in London.

And also, the same message, to Sherlock Holmes, of Baker Street, also in London.

My brothers.

On Enola's fourteenth birthday, her mother leaves without a word or a note, only three gifts: a fully-supplied drawing kit; a book on the meanings of flowers and other things; and a small book of ciphers.

Ciphers are word puzzles; for example, Enola's name is a very simple cipher. When spelled backward, it spells 'alone,' as Enola has often found herself, quite content. Or, for another example, ALO NEK OOL NIY MSM UME HTN ASY RHC is the first cipher Enola solves to find the message: Enola, look in my chrysanthemums.

Armed with the information left in these gifts, Enola sets out to find her mother, ignoring the plans Mycroft has set out for her (a boarding school? Not on her life) and hopefully outsmarting the great detective Sherlock Holmes.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C O'Brien

When widowed Mrs. Frisby's youngest son Timothy comes down with pneumonia, she goes to the area herbalist, Mr. Ages, for medicine which he says will cure the sickness in three or four days. But, he adds, it will be several weeks before Timothy can go out into cold or cool air safely without falling sick again and dying.

This doesn't seem like much of a problem, does it? And it wouldn't be, for you or I. We'd be a little bored, of course, stuck in the house, bundled in blankets, a little tired and weak, but it wouldn't be that big of a thing.

But you see, Mrs. Frisby, Timothy, and the rest of her children are field mice, and even Mr. Ages is a small white mouse. They live in houses they've created on Mr. Fitzgibbon's farm. Mr. Ages lives in a hollowed-out space of a brick wall, and Mrs. Frisby lives with her four children in a concrete block - you know, one of those ones with two holes through the middle, just right to make two cozy rooms for a mouse family? - against a boulder in the middle of Mr. Fitzgibbon's big field.

Which is the biggest problem of all, for you see, every spring when Mr. Fitzgibbon begins to plow his field, Mrs. Frisby and her family have to move to a safe place in the woods. But with Timothy sick, they can't move - and the spring thaw is coming soon. Mr. Fitzgibbon has the tractor ready, with the sharp shiny plow already attached to the back.

They can't go and they can't stay, and perhaps there's only one direction Mrs. Frisby can look for help, if she can find the courage: the mysterious rats of NIMH.