title: Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times
author:  Emma Trevayne 
description: Feeling bored and unloved in his stuffy, late-nineteenth-century London home, Jack follows an enigmatic magician through a portal into an alternate world. There he explores the eerily familiar, yet frighteningly different city of Londinium, where brass grills embedded in the inhabitants nostrils enable them to breathe heavily polluted air. After being ensnared by the malevolent magician and adopted by the unstable Lady, who rules the land, Jack escapes and works with his few friends to free an ancient creature that can set things right in this damaged world. Clockwork creatures, metal fairies, and industrial pollution give the fantasy a steampunk twist. Like the storys setting, its tone is bleakuncommonly so for a novel apparently aimed at middle-graders. The dramatic plot twists, more than involvement with the mostly adult characters, will draw readers to finish the story, as will the vividly described settings and smooth pacing. The black-and-white illustrations were not available for comment, though the jacket art is intriguing. An unusual take on the alternate-worlds theme. Grades 5-7. --Carolyn Phelan
zlib_text: **The Right Path**
  
  Nora Roberts
  
    
  
  **Chapter One**
  
  The sky was cloudless—the hard, perfect blue of a summer painting. A breeze
  whispered through the roses in the garden. Mountains were misted by distance.
  A scent—flowers, sea, new grass—drifted on the air. With a sigh of pure
  pleasure, Morgan leaned farther over the balcony rail and just looked.
  
  Had it real y only been yesterday morning that she had looked out on New
  York’s steel and concrete? Had she run through a chil April drizzle to catch a
  taxi to the airport? One day. It seemed impossible to go from one world to
  another in only a day.
  
  But she was here, standing on the balcony of a vil a on the Isle of Lesbos.
  There was no gray drizzle at al , but strong Greek sunlight. There was quiet,
  a deep blanketing stil ness that contrasted completely with the fits and
  starts of New York traffic. If I could paint, Morgan mused, I’d paint this
  view and cal it _Silence._
  
  “Come in,” she cal ed when there was a knock on the door. After on