Cricket Magazine Fiction and Non-Fiction Stories for Children and Young Teens November/December 2016

“One Snowy Night” medium Leonid Gore was born and raised in Belarus. He studied art in the Academy of Arts in Minsk. Since 1990, he has been living in the United States, where he has illustrated more than thirty children’s books, five of which he also wrote. Gore has been widely praised for his artwork in such books as Sleeping Boy (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year) and Lucy Dove (an IRA Children’s Choice book and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year). He also excels at illustrations for book covers, including those for The Christmas Rat by Avi, Well Wished and The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley, and Blizzard! by Jim Murphy. His paintings have regularly been shown at the prestigious and competitive annual exhibitions of…

Dear Everybuggy, Your magazine is absolutely amazing! I read the issues over and over again. Pussywillow, you’re my favorite buggy because you’re soooo cute! I have a cat named Milktoast that you would love to play with. Ladybug, I know you’re just trying to help, but you don’t have to be so bossy about things. Maybe try to be a little nicer and calm down? Ugly Bird, why not have some popcorn instead of eating the buggies? Birds love popcorn! Anyways, I’m a big-time Warriors cats fan and I love cats! My main hobbies are cooking, reading, and social media. This is my first time using the Chatterbox, and I will definitely be coming back! Treefern Inkwell, Chatterbox Bossy? Me? Listen up, Treefern: you’ve got the wrong Ladybug! I’m as…

A GENTLY CURVED bottle of sky-blue glass, rough and powdery looking like beach glass, its stopper topped by a yellow star cut from the same sort of glass. Blue and yellow. Swedish colors. For many years that bottle lay forgotten in a dusty box on a closet shelf in the Ellifson house, though it was a wonderful object in many ways, and not just to look at. Nellie lived in that house with her mother and grandmother. But Nellie’s mother became ill and died very suddenly, and Nellie cried every day all day. Her grandmother, trying to comfort her, remembered a gift given to her long ago, and brought the box to Nelly. “What is it, Elfa?” she asked. Nellie had called her grandmother Elfa ever since she was too…

THE FAMILIAR RED of the swastika armband caught my eye. Through the early morning mist, I saw the outline of a soldier’s body. I figured he was dead, but I had to be certain. I glanced around. No one in sight. Common sense told me to get out of there, but I trudged toward the soldier, my boots heavy in the mud, his body pulling me like a magnet. I slowed a few meters from where the soldier lay and held my breath. He was on his back, his hands over his head like he was lifting them in surrender. During the past four years of German occupation I’d seen a total of three dead bodies, but never one this close. I swallowed hard, trying to push back the nausea.…

FOR AN ESPECIALLY delicious Christmas morning breakfast, try these big, hot and puffy pancakes. Dutch pancakes are really more German than Dutch. Their name comes from Deutsch, the German word for German. Whatever you call them, they’re a scrumptious treat for a frosty holiday morning. What You Need: 2 eggs 1 cup milk 1 cup flour 2 tablespoons sugar 3 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar What to Do: 1. Preheat oven to 375°F. 2. In a medium-size bowl, whisk together eggs, milk, flour, and sugar until lump free. 3. On the stovetop, melt butter completely in a cast-iron or other ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. 4.Pour the batter into the hot pan and cook for one minute, then ask an adult to set the pan of batter in the…

IF YOU GO far, far north in New York City, you’ll come to a place that looks just like a country town. There are tall trees and little houses with gardens on narrow, crooked streets. It’s a quiet place. You can almost forget where you are. On one of those crooked streets there once lived a large brown cat. He had brown stripes on his back, on his head, and on his legs. But on his tail, which was thick and broad, he had black stripes. He had amber eyes, fine white whiskers, and a white tip on his broad tail. He was very big, the biggest cat in the neighborhood, perhaps in the whole city. When he stretched himself out full length, which he was fond of doing on…