Mrs. Tittlemouse is a tale in which no humans play a part and one in which events are treated as though they have occurred since time immemorial and far from human observance. It is a simple story, and one likely to appeal to young children. Mrs. Tittlemouse is a "most terribly tidy little mouse always sweeping and dusting the soft sandy floors" in the "yards and yards" of passages and storerooms, nut-cellars, and seed-cellars in her "funny house" amongst the roots of a hedge. She has a kitchen, a parlour, a pantry, a larder, and a bedroom where she keeps her dust-pan and brush next to her little box bed. She tries to keep her house tidy, but insect intruders leave dirty footprints on the floors and all sorts of messes about the place. A beetle is shooed away, a ladybird is exorcised with "Fly away home! Your house is on fire!", and a spider inquiring after Miss Muffet is turned away with little ceremony. In a distant passage, Mrs. Tittlemouse meets Babbitty Bumble, a bumble bee who has taken up residence with three or four other bees in one of the empty storerooms. Mrs. Tittlemouse tries to pull out their nest but they buzz fiercely at her, and she retreats to deal with the matter after dinner. In her parlour, she finds her toad neighbour Mr. Jackson sitting before the fire in her rocking chair. Mr. Jackson lives in "a drain below the hedge, in a very dirty wet ditch". His coat tails drip with water and he leaves wet footmarks on Mrs. Tittlemouse''s parlour floor. She follows him about with a mop and dish-cloth. Mr. Jackson stays for dinner, but the food is not to his pleasing, and he rummages about the cupboard searching for the honey he can smell. He discovers a butterfly in the sugar bowl, but when he finds the bees, he makes a big mess pulling out their nest. Mrs. Tittlemouse fears she "shall go distracted" as a result of the turmoil and takes refuge in the nut-cellar. When she finally ventures forth, she discovers everybody has left but her house is a mess. She takes some moss, beeswax, and twigs to partly close up her front door to keep Mr. Jackson out. Exhausted, she goes to bed wondering if her house will ever be tidy again. The fastidious little mouse spends a fortnight spring cleaning. She rubs the furniture with beeswax and polishes her little tin spoons, then holds a party for five other little wood-mice wearing their Regency finery. Mr. Jackson attends but is forced to sit outside because Mrs. Tittlemouse has narrowed her door. He takes no offence at being excluded from the parlour. Acorn-cupfuls of honeydew are passed through the window to him and he toasts Mrs. Tittlemouse''s good health.

The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse

;Dunyazadiad The Dunyazadiad is a retelling of the framing story of Scheherazade, the famed storyteller of the One Thousand and One Nights. The story is told from the point-of-view of Scheherazade''s younger sister Dunyazad. Its characterization as metafiction can be understood as a result of the use of several literary devices, most notably the introduction of the author as a character and his interaction with Scheherazade and Dunyazade. The author appears from the future and expresses his admiration for Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights as a work of fiction, of which Barth''s Scheherazade has no knowledge. Realizing that he has appeared to Scheherazade on the eve of her first encounter with Shahryar, and seeing her without a solution to her predicament, the author himself suggests the stratagem of using a chain of interrupted stories to forestall her execution, and offers to tell her a new story every day with which to regale the king the following evening. Taking the author for a genie, Scheherazade agrees. ;Perseid The second novella entitled Perseid follows the middle aged Greek hero Perseus in his struggle to obtain immortality. Told from Perseus'' point of view, the first part of the story revolves around the retelling of Perseus'' life history while the following part details his rise to, and eventual immortalization as a constellation of stars. ;Bellerophoniad The final novella, Bellerophoniad, chronicles the story of Bellerophon, yet another ancient Greek hero. While somewhat rooted in the myth as told by the Greek and Roman poets, Barth''s version of the story is not a direct retelling, but instead a re-imagining. Much like the Perseid, the Bellerophoniad surrounds a middle aged mythic hero who struggles with coming to terms with his past accomplishments and a desire to secure his future glory. It is, for the most part, told from the point of view of Bellerophon, with various interjections by unknown narrators, one of which is presumed to be the author Barth. Of the three novellas, it is by far the longest and&mdash;more so than in Dunyazadiad and Perseid&mdash;makes numerous references to the other novellas, further connecting common themes and events between the three.

Chimera

In the beginning of the story Jonah and his friend Chip Winston, who also learns that he is adopted, receive letters from an unknown person. The letters say “You are one of the missing” and “Beware! They are coming to get you”. At first they take it as some kind of joke but soon to wonder more and more about who are their birth parents and why they got these letters. They decide that the best way to figure out is to go into Chip’s parent''s safe. There they find a phone number to an FBI agent named James Reardon. Soon Jonah asks his parents if they can call the adoption agency and ask who his birth parents really are. They only tell his dad to contact the FBI to talk to James Reardon. Jonah, his parents, and his sister Katherine meet James Reardon. Right before the meet, a janitor gives Jonah a bottle of Mountain Dew. When they finally meet with James Reardon, he tells them Jonah was illegally adopted from a foreign country and might be deported. He refuses to tell them the country''s name, though. When Jonah goes to the bathroom to throw up thanks to the Mountain Dew, another, younger janitor appears out of nowhere in the bathroom and tells him a file would appear on the desk by the time he got back. He tells Jonah to memorize as many names as possible. Back in the room, he distracts the adults while Katherine takes pictures of the documents. It turns out to be the addresses and phone numbers of 36 teenagers, including Chip and Jonah. It also includes the names of several adults, including a woman named Angela DuPre. Chip and Katherine begin calling the numbers. The adults all hung up. Most of the kids turn out to live in the vicinity of Chip and Jonah. After a while they receive a letter from Angela DuPre, telling them to meet her at the library to talk about the things that are happening and get more information. At the library, Angela DuPre tells them that time travelers exist and that she had been researching. She tells them that she used to work at an airport, until an airplane, full of babies, appeared out of nowhere. After the babies were removed, the plane disappeared. She speculates that the babies on the plane were originally adults who were turned into babies by time traveling. Then a man breaks into the room and is promptly tackled by the "janitor" from the FBI who talked to Jonah in the bathroom. Chip, Jonah, and Katherine escape through a window, but Angela stays behind for more information. Later, when they''re leaving the library, they see Angela, who disappears into thin air. When they get home, they find out the lists of names was deleted from Chip''s computer. Shortly afterwards, Jonah''s mom receives a flyer in the mail advertising an adoption conference for teen adoptees and their parents. Jonah persuades his parents to let him bring Katherine along, too. At the conference, all the adoptees are divided into two groups, with Jonah, Chip, and all the kids on the list in one group, and everyone else in another. Katherine pretends to be a girl named Daniella McCarthy to get into Jonah''s group. The kids are led to a cave in the woods by two men name Gary and Mr. Hodge. Then the cave is transported to a place called a time hollow. The "janitor" from the FBI, whom Jonah, Chip, and Katherine have nicknamed JB, appears and attacks Gary and Mr. Hodge. Soon Angela arrives too. They find out that Gary and Hodge work for an organization called Interchronological Rescue, an organization dedicated to rescuing children from history, such as toddlers trapped in burning houses and people left for dead during the Bubonic Plague; taking them to the distant future; turning them into babies; and putting them up for adoption. The organization got greedy, however, and they started taking famous babies whose disappearances were noticed. Finally, when they were flying to the future with a load of babies, JB chased after the plane and caused it to crash in the twenty-first century. Gary and Hodge want to turn all the kids into babies and take them to the future, and JB wants to send them all back to die. Finally, JB sends Chip and another boy named Alex back to the fifteenth century , but Jonah and Katherine grab Chip''s arms right before he disappears and find themselves falling backwards through time. On the way, Jonah manages to convince JB to let him and Katherine help Chip and Alex repair time so everyone can go home to the twenty-first century.

Found

When Lindsay Boxer gets a lead on a recent murder of a teenager, she responds to the call and joins Warren Jacobi on a stakeout of a Mercedes. When the car takes off, a high speed chase ends in a crash. The officers discover two teenagers in their father’s car, who are scared and have been hurt. They help them out, but the teens pull guns and both officers are shot. After being hit in the shoulder and thigh, and seeing Jacobi shot twice, Boxer returns fire. The girl is killed, and the boy is paralyzed for life. As Boxer and Jacobi are recovering in the hospital, they are told that everything is legally good, that is was a case of self-defense. Then, Boxer receives a notice she is being sued by the teenagers'' father for wrongful death. Taking a vacation before the trial starts, Boxer housesits for her sister in Half Moon Bay. While there she reads about recent murders in which the victims’ throats were cut and they were whipped. This resembles an unsolved case from before, so Boxer begins to investigate informally. After a few days, the Half Moon Bay police chief tells her to mind her own business, but reconsiders when the next bodies are found. Boxer meets with her friends to try to determine a link between victims as her trial date approaches. Boxer is found not guilty, and instead of returning to work right away, goes back to Half Moon Bay, determined to solve the recent murders. She is only there a day when the killers leave her a message by shooting up the house. She gets out and follows more clues, then finally catches up with a guy who has been following her. He is arrested and confesses to the killings. It is not until Alison Brown, her friend’s daughter, shows up at her house that Boxer catches the other two killers. They are part of a vigilante group of former victims who take the law into their own hands, playing the role of The Seeker, The Watcher, and The Truth. After they are all arrested, Boxer returns to San Francisco a double hero, for winning the trial and solving the murders.

4th of July

Kristina thinks that now she has a baby to care for and love, she can let go of the old addiction. But she finds herself searching for Robyn, her old contact for the "street crank". While over at her house she meets a boy named Trey and starts to crave for people to look like they want or need her. Once she gets home, she begins to work at a 7-Eleven to get the money to buy more crank. The manager there is a porn dealer and offers her a job as a prostitute, but she declines. After learning that her father is coming to her mother''s home to be at the christening of her new baby, Hunter Seth, she begs her mother to let him come and she agrees, on the condition that Kristina has to be the one to tell her older sister. Once her father comes, he takes her to casinos for her eighteenth birthday party and they snort some lines while there. This causes Kristina to be almost late for Hunter''s christening, but she manages to make it on time. Meanwhile, Kristina has started dating Trey and began smoking "glass", which is much more harmful than smoking crank because it is pure meth in rock size quantities. Kristina begins to smoke it every day, becoming skinnier and crashing more often. After crashing one day, her mother kicks her out of the house because she didn''t even try to wake to save Hunter, who had rolled himself under a chair and couldn''t get out. Kristina then moves in with Brad, Trey''s cousin, while serving as the babysitter of Brad''s two young daughters, Devon and LeTreya. She quits working at 7-Eleven by using blackmail and gets a call from Robyn. After finding out that Robyn now works at a "whorehouse", Kristina goes over and is able to sell the girls ice, instead of street crank, which was the only meth they''d had access to. Trey leaves for college and Kristina soon finds herself becoming attracted to Brad. After Trey comes home, she asks him why he hadn''t been answering the phone and he responds with that he had been seeing a girl for sex only and that he still loved Kristina. She passes out and finds him gone. This saddens Kristina and she begins to have sex with Brad. When Trey comes home, he finds Kristina sleeping in the same bed as Brad but instead of getting mad at her, he starts having sex with her while Brad is sleeping. Brad''s estranged wife Angela comes back because she wants another try to be together with Brad. So, Brad kicks Kristina out. Thus, Kristina is forced to move out and into a motel nearby. She is also able to meet the man that gives Brad the crystal meth, Cesar. Once Trey comes back, he confesses to Kristina that the girl he had been sleeping with was Angela until she came back to Brad. So, he was also forced to move out. She agrees to him moving in and they soon begin to live together. They then move to an apartment together. Kristina asks her mother if she can bring Hunter over to her apartment so Hunter could stay with his mother and stepfather. But Kristina gives him back when she finds Hunter on the ground after having fallen from his high chair. She realizes that her mother was right and that she is not ready to raise Hunter. Kristina, desperate for some money, steals most of her mother''s jewelry and check books. When Kristina gets a court order because her mother thinks that Kristina is an unfit mother, she and Trey decide to make a run for it after a picture of her is put in the newspaper asking for people to turn her in. They soon arrive in California with only a few pairs of clothes, all their meth, and money. They fall asleep in the car after a meal at McDonalds and are awakened by a cop. He asks them to step outside and he finds the half pound of crystal meth. They are arrested and taken to jail. They have to stay the entire weekend and during this time Kristina detoxes from the meth. Because Kristina had a history in Nevada, she and Trey are put behind homestate bars. They are offered the chance of ratting on Cesar to shorten their jail sentence to six months which they agree to. During her checkup, Kristina finds out that she is pregnant with Trey''s baby and hopes the baby is a girl so that Kristina will be able to love the baby like she should have done with Hunter. She hopes she can stay in touch with Trey and if not she knows she will with Quade. The novel ends with Kristina hoping that things will get better in her life even though she has no reason to be hopeful.

Glass

Young Moth had grown up in Calio, the mountain city -and he considered himself lucky to live in this very special place. For in Calio a man could be a Skyknight, one of the elite pilots who flew the fragile, beautiful, newfangled flying machines called dragonflies. Any man who dreamed of flying belonged in only one place, Calio, the city on the edge of the world. And young Moth, who had worked at the aerodrome since he was ten, wanted to fly more than anything. To the north of Calio stretched the Reach, looking like a sea of fog that never ended. There were numerous tall tales about the lands beyond the Reach, and Moth heard the oddest of them regularly now that he was living with Leroux. When Moth was ten, and first taken in by Leroux, he had been especially fascinated by Leroux''s stories of the Skylords, but at the grown-up age of thirteen, Moth was becoming increasingly skeptical about the existence of these mysterious, powerful, and frightening beings from beyond the Reach. But Moth''s life was about to change in ways he could not even imagine, and soon the land of the Skylords would become more real and more threatening than the most outlandish tales Leroux could have spun. For soon Moth would have a key to another world -the world beyond the Reach...

Starfinder

Joseph and Harriet Blackstone, and Joseph''s mother Lilian, are immigrants from England on the SS Albert into the South Island of New Zealand in 1860s. After settling the two women into accommodation in Christchurch, Joseph travels to the foothills near the Okuku river to build their Cob House. Joseph returns to Christchurch once the house has been built and the three of them set off to start their new lives on their farm. The harsh first winter brings with it problems which threaten the viability of their farm, but Joseph''s chance finding of gold in the nearby creek changes the situation. Not telling Harriet about the find, Joseph abandons the farm and travels by boat to Hokitika on the West Coast of the South Island where major gold strikes have occurred. After Lilian''s death, Harriet also travels to Hokitika and delivers that news to Joseph. The search for gold, the ''colour'', goes on in difficult conditions. Joseph''s encounters with Will Sefton, a young man whom he met on the boat bringing them to the West Coast, and Pao Yi, a Chinese gardener befriended by Harriet, add flavour to the dynamics of the searching couple''s relationship which has become distant and strained. Joseph''s guilt surrounding events in England prior to their emigration impact on this separation.

The Colour

After a vicious ninja attack left him orphaned and stranded in Japan, Jack Fletcher managed to complete his first year of samurai school. Still, his troubles are far from over. The prejudice of his Japanese classmates has gained him dangerous enemies within his school, and Dragon Eye -- the ninja who killed his father -- is still after him. Jack''s only hope of defeating them lies in surviving the Circle of Three: an ancient ritual that tests a samurai''s courage, skill, and spirit to the limit. For most, gaining entry into the Circle means honor and glory, but for Jack it''s a matter of life or death. The winner will be trained in the Two Heavens -- the formidable sword technique of the great samurai, Masamoto. Learning this secret is the only hope Jack has of protecting his father''s rutter -- the invaluable navigation guide of the world''s uncharted oceans -- from Dragon Eye. Forced into a deadly battle, Jack''s going to have to master the Way of the Sword. And his time is running out.

Young Samurai: The Way of the Sword

Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood in 1997. Desperate pleas for help from the child’s aunt led savvy, tough-nosed investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl — only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home. Now Amanda is 16 — and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Amanda’s aunt is once again knocking at Patrick Kenzie’s door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, bright young woman who hasn’t been seen in two weeks. Haunted by the past, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most, following a 12-year trail of secrets and lies down the darkest alleys of Boston’s gritty, blue-collar streets. Assuring themselves that this time will be different, they vow to make good on their promise to find Amanda and see that she is safe. But their determination to do the right thing holds dark implications Kenzie and Gennaro aren’t prepared for ... consequences that could cost them not only Amanda’s life, but their own. Since "Prayers for Rain" Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro have married and had a child.

Moonlight Mile

Part of the book takes place In 1945 Holland, during the last part of World War II. The story centers on two Dutch men codenamed Tamar and Dart, who are agents of a covert military group called the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. In this point in time Holland is occupied by the Nazis, and the Dutch resistance is “a bloody shambles”. Tamar and Dart, his WO (wireless operator), are sent into Holland to organize the different resistance groups into a more cohesive unit. This is Tamar’s second time in Holland as an SOE agent, and he is sent to recover his old alias, Christiaan Boogart. When he arrives he reunites with the woman he fell in love with the first time he was in Holland, Marijke. As the novel continues Dart begins to spend more time with Marijke, and begins to fall in love with her, oblivious to the fact that she and Tamar are in love. After realizing that Tamar and Marijke are involved Dart is described as feeling furious and comes to the conclusion “that it was not her fault. She had been seduced, cynically and deliberately, by the man [Tamar] who should have been protecting her.” Slowly he begins to hate and distrust Tamar. Meanwhile, a group of the resistance led by Koop de Vries open fire on a Nazi vehicle. One of the men they shot turns out to be the head of Nazi internal security in Holland, SS Lieutenant General Hanns Albin Rauter. Rauter is rushed to a hospital and dispatches his deputy to execute the number of Dutch prisoners as there are bullet holes in his car, 243. When Tamar hears about this, and the executions begin, he tracks down Koop and confronts him, telling him “I know where to find you.” As the story continues, Koop and his group are ambushed by the Nazis at their hideout, and everyone is killed except for Koop, who manages to run. At the asylum where Koop receives medical treatment he reveals to Dart that he believes Dart and Tamar have betrayed the resistance. Dart believes he gains Koop’s confidence by telling him “I believe you. I think Tamar betrayed your group.” The two create a plan to get rid of Tamar. Their plan goes smoothly, they kill Tamar, but Koop attacks Dart, and is shot by Marjke. When she sees Tamar’s body “she [throws] her head back and [begins] to howl like an animal.” Eventually Dart convinces Marijke that it is too dangerous to stay in Holland, and the two flee to England. In the prologue of the novel, before Tamar is born, her grandfather, William Hyde, requests her father Jan to name her Tamar. The novel then fast forwards to when Tamar is fifteen-years-old in London, 1995 and lives with her mother after her father, Jan, disappears. Her grandmother, Marijke, is slowly going mentally downhill, and speaks more Dutch than English. Tamar and her mother accompany her grandfather to the assisted living center where her grandmother will be staying. Her grandmother rejects the company of her grandfather and insists on riding only with Tamar “I’m not going with you! I’m staying with Tamar, here with Tamar.” Shortly after her grandmother is sent to the living center her grandfather commits suicide. Tamar takes his death hard, and waits months to go and visit her grandfathers flat with her mother. Once at the flat she finds a box laying on her bed labeled Tamar. Inside the box lay many clues leading to her grandfather’s past. She takes the box to her distant cousin Yoyo (Johannes van Zant) who decides they should follow the clues and see where they lead. In the middle of the plot, during Tamar and Yoyo’s adventure along the Tamar river they slowly start to fall in love with each other, despite their age differences. As the novel continues Tamar and Yoyo explore the river just as Tamar’s father happens upon them, “And I couldn''t look at him, because I was watching the other man’s face and he was watching mine,” and invites them into his home. After settling everyone down Tamar’s father begins to unravel the secret he has kept hidden since the day he left Tamar and her mother. He tells Tamar and Yoyo that her supposed grandfather, William Hyde, is not actually her grandfather. Her real grandfather is Tamar (Christaan Boogart) who was killed in World War II by a man named Koop de Vries, and was led to do so by William Hyde, or Dart as he was known during that time. It takes Tamar awhile to take all this in; “I couldn’t imagine how he could have kept all that stuff dammed up inside him all this time without being at least three parts crazy,” and she even forgives Hyde. In the epilogue she ends up marrying Yoyo.

Tamar

Doctor Simms, the headmaster of the Coldbrook Country School - to which the five wayward youths, all sixteen years old, have been dispatched – succinctly lays out the “plot” to Nat Rittenhouse, the school’s hired assassin: :"We take them off their hands, those lemons. Once and for all. Quick and neat and clean and utterly untraceable. We have those limestone faults quite near the school-these fissures on the surface of the planet. Some of them seem almost bottomless. Drop a lemon into one....we never hear it hit. We call that ''grounding'', Mr. Rittenhouse. A natural and wholesome term, I hope you will agree. At Coldbrook, we are definitely....organic." But the twenty-two year old Nat, who agreed to take on the poisoning of the kids so he could pay off a gambling debt he owed to gangsters, bonds with the members of Group 6. He sees nothing much wrong with the kids, and soon becomes really fond of them. These are the five in Group 6: * Lean and lanky, bitter Coke, who has trouble keeping his shirttails in, has packed cigarettes and white rum in his backpack. * The more naïve, much shorter Sully hates his life in New York City and his mother’s dreadful “manfriend”. * Potty-mouthed and funny, Marigold is wise as well as cynical. She slept with one of her mother’s boyfriends. * Athletic, organized, popular Sarah is an over-achiever who was driven to cheat on an English paper. * And Ludi, who can see things and hear sounds that are not “there”, has ways and attitudes that just enrage her father. At first, Nat does not have the heart to let the kids in on the truth, but he finally breaks the news after they have pieced some clues together on their own. Nat also tells them that because he has not killed them he’s on the school’s hit list, too. From that point on, Nat and Group 6 are a team, living mostly in a cabin he built in the woods, a few miles from the school. Even as the kids begin to master survival skills, a hunt begins. Because it was the gangsters who provided Nat to the school, they are shamed by his failure to do the killing, so they send an employee to kill him. And two outrageous middle-aged members of the school’s faculty, a man and a woman, who are both crack shots, take their rifles into the woods, looking for Nat and the kids. Eventually, the headmaster recruits the entire student body to join in the search, because one of those odd faculty members has mysteriously “vanished”. With most of the school’s population combing the woods, the kids dare to enter the school to search for proofs of their parents’ dreadful (and criminal) “deal”. The climax of the book is there for you to read. Suffice it to say that in the course of their time together the kids make peace with the loss of their old families and gain an unbreakable appreciation of their new one. English Journal reviewer, Dick Abrahamson noted that it is the Plot and characters that drive the story and hold the reader''s interest: "It is the plot that keeps the reader turning the pages of this book. Characterization is handled by having the individual teenagers react to each other. The reader watches the teenagers deal with the horror of finding out that their parents have paid to have them killed. We also watch as the individuals of Group 6 develop a sense of responsibility and a love for each other." Norma Fox Mazer, a YA author, said that "The author has taken a grotesque subject and made of it a story not only scary, but, praise be, funny. Reading the book, I laughed as often as I shivered and turned pages as fast as possible to find out that most basic and important of all things - what is going to happen."

The Grounding of Group 6

At the start of the story, Youn Suu is a rookie Explorer on her first assignment in interstellar space. Like most Explorers, she suffers from a significant physical deformity&mdash;in her case, a facial blemish that has been left untreated to "qualify" her for the Explorer Corps. Her first assignment, with her partner Tut, is to investigate a sudden infestation of the Balrog in a domed city on the home world of the Cashlings. While there, she is herself infested by the red moss. At the same time, Youn Suu and Tut encounter Admiral Festina Ramos, present on a mission of her own. Aboard an Outward fleet starship, Youn Suu is monitored medically, though there is no cure for her condition and no real treatment. The Balrog, far more than a parasite, is a hive mind well above the human level of development, so that killing it would violate the central precept of the League of Peoples. As its symbiotic relationship with its human host develops, the Balrog comes to share the mental functioning of its host, and prolongs the host''s life while consuming her body&mdash;"her" because the only prior human host was also female (and also a Buddhist). Youn Suu is also exposed to potential exploitation, by people who want to use the Balrog''s special abilities for their own purposes. Meanwhile, Ramos and the other explorers are called to an emergency rescue on a planet called Muta, where Unity survey teams have suddenly disappeared, with barely a peep of a distress signal. The planet Muta, temperate and Earth-like, is to outward appearances almost ideal for colonization; yet colonizing efforts by the Unity, and the Greenstriders, and perhaps others, have mysteriously failed. The three Explorers land on the planet; even with the most elaborate precautions they fall prey to its peculiar circumstances, and find themselves stranded and contaminated with a microbe that threatens to destroy their bodies. Investigating their predicament, they learn that the entire planet was once a global research station for the Fuentes, a species that discovered a way to transcend the physical body and transform itself into energy-based or consciousness-based entities. The research done by the Fuentes on Muta 6500 years earlier had been in pursuit of that goal&mdash;but had gone horribly wrong, dooming Fuentes and Greenstrider and Unity individuals to a disembodied but tortuous existence. While being hunted by raptor-like reptiles, the three Explorers must find a way to repair alien technology to reverse the damage, before their own bodies collapse.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse

By Beatrix Potter

Chimera

By John Barth

Found

By Margaret Haddix

4th of July

By Maxine Paetro

Glass

By Ellen Hopkins

Starfinder

No Author Listed

The Colour

By Rose Tremain

Young Samurai: The Way of the Sword

By Chris Bradford

Moonlight Mile

By Dennis Lehane

Tamar

By Mal Peet

The Grounding of Group 6

No Author Listed

Radiant

By James Alan Gardner