How can a beautiful white elephant be a terrible curse?Run-Run, a young elephant trainer, discovers the answer when he incurs the fury of the prince. The boy's punishment? The gift of an elephant, white as a cloud. From that moment forward, the curse reveals itself. According to tradition, so rare an elephant cannot be allowed to work for its keep. It is poor Run-Run who must feed the beast the hundreds of pounds of food it eats each day, and scrub it clean, and brush its pom-pom of a tail, and wash behind its ears, and, above all, keep it from doing any work.Oh, if only Run-Run could make the magnificent white elephant disappear! Clever as a magician, he does—but the curse has tricks of its own for Run-Run.

Welcome to Humbug Mountain! Little did Wiley, the son of a traveling newspaperman, imagine that the search for his grandfather would lead him into the hands of those nasty villains of the West—Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer. Using their newspaper, The Humbug Mountain Hoorah, Wiley and his sister and mother go about outwitting the outlaws in their scheme to ambush Grandfather's new boat and its cargo of gold. Winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, from Newbery Award-winning author Sid Flesichman.

Orphan Jingo Hawks is out of luck when Mrs. Daggatt hires him out as a chimney sweep to the awful General Dirty-Face Scurlock. But it's gypsy luck that day in 1854 puts Jingo into the right chimney and then into the care of the mysterious Mr. Peacock-Hancock-Jones, who claims to know Jingo's scoundrel father. Together they set out on a treasure hunt from Boston to Mexico for buried gold. But they are not alone — those nasty gold diggers Mrs. Daggatt and General Scurlock are hot on their trail. But Mr. Peacock-Hancock-Jones has more than a few surprises in store . . .

One night The Great Freddie, a young ventriloquist, is possessed by a dybbuk.A what?A Jewish spirit. A scrappy demon who glows as if spray-painted by moonlight.The dybbuk is revealed to be the ghost of a twelve-year-old boy named Avrom Amos, a victim of the Nazis during World War II. In a plucky scheme to seek revenge, he commandeers The Great Freddie's stage act and entraps the entertainer in the postwar ashes of Germany. Behind the footlights, the dybbuk lights up the terrible fate of a million and a half Jewish children, including Avrom himself.What tricks does the dybbuk have up his ghostly sleeve? Prepare to be astonished. . . .