Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i Cricket Magazine Fiction and Non-Fiction Stories for Children and Young Teens

EVERY AFTERNOON COSTI jogged through his village to the bus stop to meet the daily bus from Bucharest. Today his breath made puffs of white in front of his face, like the cotton candy he and his friend had sampled on Children’s Day last year. At the plastic lean-to, he perched on a cold seat next to the village priest and his younger sister Ana. “Buna ziua,” the priest said. Costi wished him a good day in return, but he didn’t look at the priest’s sister. Ana, tall and beautiful and always laughing, made him stuttery and shy. “You are here again?” the priest asked. Costi said, “I wait every afternoon for my brother. He will come home from Germany any day now.” The priest grunted. So many Romanian young…

“OWEN WANTED TO SCREAM AT THE HORROR BEFORE HIM.” STORY THIEVES by James Riley submitted by Claire Springston of Erin, NY “Sophie had waited all her life to be kidnapped.” THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL by Soman Chainani submitted by Josie Rae Matkowski of Springfield, MO “There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys.” THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN by George MacDonald submitted by Lucy M. of Austin, TX “Yeah, I know, you guys are going to read about how I died in agony, and you’re going to be like ‘Wow!’” MAGNUS CHASE AND THE SWORD OF SUMMER (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book 1) by Rick Riordan submitted by Caroline H.of Washington, DC “I never…

CAN A MUSICAL instrument hypnotize you? Drive you crazy? Make you tremble in fear? Jane Rosenberg wrote to tell me that all this was said to be true of the glass harmonica, which was invented by Benjamin Franklin more than two hundred and fifty years ago. In 1761, Franklin attended an unusual concert in England played on water glasses. Each glass held a different amount of water which produced a different note when its rim was rubbed with a wet finger. Enchanted by the delicate sound, Franklin was inspired to create a new design. Instead of water-filled glasses, he stacked thirty-seven glass bowls of graduated sizes on an iron rod. He then placed the rod sideways in a cabinet, where it could be turned by a foot pedal. A musician…

Dear Everybuggy, Our grandparents got my older sister Ana Jean a subscription to Cricket for Christmas 2019. After she reads it, I get to. I am terrible at spelling, math, and grammar. I’ve been homeschooled since second grade. I love to read, write, and draw. I also like to sew. I want to make a dress for myself or one of my siblings. I used to take ballet, but with six kids we had too much going on with school, sports, and music. So we quit all our sports and now do only one: climbing at a bouldering gym. A few days ago we were looking in little free libraries, and I found in one of them a Cricket magazine from December 1977! It was ssssoooooo different from the ones…

Part 2 Wandering around after school one day, Jamie finds herself in an unfamiliar part of town. Lost and with night falling, she follows a white cat up to a ramshackle house filled with valuable antiques. An old man named Eddy lives there, and over tea and cakes, he tells her that he’s a time traveler. He says he brought Caesar, the white cat, home with him from Persia. He claims to have sailed to the New World with Christopher Columbus and helped George Washington Carver discover the fifty-ninth use for the peanut. When Jamie gets up to leave, Eddy hands her some coins so she can call home from a gas station pay phone. He also tells her that he would be glad if she came to see him…

A young snow-white goose and a smaller black swan with an injured leg find themselves left behind on a lake when their flocks migrate south for the winter. After avoiding each other for a time, they begin to seek each other’s company, feeding together and taking turns watching for predators. Living on a nearby farm are two children who have been watching the birds, wondering how they will survive the harsh northern winter. One day they bring an old rabbit hutch to the lake and place it where the goose and swan have been sleeping, hoping the birds will shelter inside it. The brother and sister kept an eye on the birds from their front porch with a pair of binoculars their father used for birdwatching. They got very excited…

Midnight is a little rescue cat whose original owners reluctantly had to leave her behind when they moved away from England. She has come to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, a kindly older couple with a large house in the country. Midnight has a number of adventures with the Joneses and the other cats they’ve adopted, including a big ginger cat named The Colonel, two beautiful Siamese cats named Lucy and Sally, their house cats Jeremy and Jemimah, and an aging street cat missing half an ear, Scotty. IT’S A WELL-KNOWN fact that cats, like all animals, do not like to go to the vet, and for Midnight it’s worse when she has to go by car. Today, though, that is exactly what is going to happen. Poor…

WINNERS MAY 2020 POETRY CONTEST I Wonder First prize 10 and under Caroline Percival, age 10 San Antonio, TX I Wonder I wonder what it’s like To be everyone else. What do they think about? Talk about? Feel? What’s it like To be short And look up at everyone else? What’s it like To not have a home, To sleep on the street? What’s it like, Having different fears? Does anyone have the same as mine? Does everyone have thoughts, Or ideas, Or souls? Does everyone have challenges Or do some go through life easy? Is anything for sure? First prize 11 and up Jiaqi Sophie Huang, age 11 Ann Arbor, MI The Mystery of Stonehenge What inked the grooves written in the ground? What erected those gray…