Doris Orgel

Willow's pet cat Mao relates how the Jade Emperor chose twelve animals to represent the years in the Chinese calendar and why there is no Year of the Cat. Includes end notes on the twelve-year lunar cycle and the Chinese zodiac animals.

A tiny mouse helps a mighty lion, who once showed him mercy, escape from a trap.

Three Greek goddesses, Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera, tell their own stories. Includes information about Greek society and religion.

Two crows, one big and one small, count things they see from one to ten and then back down again.

In this modern version of the French folktale "Stone Soup," Rag-Tag Meg shows the neighborhood how to make a delicious pot of soup starting with only water and an old wooden button.

Princess Psyche's beauty incurs the wrath of the goddess Venus who sends her son Cupid to seek revenge.

Shrimp must decide whether to befriend the new boy in his neighborhood, who is a Croatian American, or to join the kids who make fun of his name and his accent.

Katie is unhappy after she and her mother move in with her very proper grandmother, until she makes friends with Luz Mendes, who makes her feel welcome and teaches her how to rollerblade.

Annie tells her friends to "come as you are"--and they do!

Austria pre-World War II. This fiction, based on the writer's own experience, is in the form of a journal of a teenager named Inge Dornenwald. Inge, a Jewish from an educated and well off family wrote about her beautiful friendship with a Roman Catholic Austrian, Lieselotte Vesseley, since the age of 7; the negative change to Austria and especially to the Jewish who were born and lived there during November 1937 to March 1938; the life saving power to any adult Jews who could have a RC baptismal certificate stamped 1936 or earlier. It is touching to read about how some RC priests at the time, in troubled Vienna, trying their best to help rescuing Jewish.

Retells the Old Testament story in which Sheba visits Solomon to test his wisdom and recounts the traditional explanation in which he passes her final test with the aid of a bee.

Fourteen-year-old Ariadne, princess of Crete, helps her beloved Theseus escape death in the labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur.

After asking the sun, a cloud, the wind, and a wall to marry her, a mouse finds just the right husband.

In attempting to follow his mother's instructions, a good-hearted boy always does the right thing at the wrong time.

Fifth graders Laura, Janet, and Vero will do anything to be popular until they realize that the price they might have to pay is their self-respect and friendship.

Becky and her two best friends have to make room for a worldly newcomer in their lives.

Having anticipated a whole week with her father in Oregon, Becky arrives to find that she has to share her dad with his friend Rosellen and her spoiled six-year-old daughter.

When her beloved cat Whiskers dies, Rebecca finds it difficult at first to vent her anger and accept her mother's comfort.