Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2022 i Cricket Magazine Fiction and Non-Fiction Stories for Children and Young Teens

My Jasper June by Laurel Snyder My Jasper June is about thirteen-year-old Leah, who’s recovering from her little brother’s death. She meets Jasper, a new girl who has secrets of her own. Together they find happiness and fun. But as the end of summer approaches and secrets are revealed, the girls have to see how real their friendship is and if they can save it. It was a really enjoyable read! I’d give it four stars. LunaWolf, age 12 winters Chirp at Cricket, Chatterbox Mystery in the Woods (The Adventure Club, Book 1)  by Michael Klement When Max and Bella go on a camping trip, they hear about an emerald robbery. They find the emerald after finding some clues. Who do you think has stolen the emerald? Read Mystery in…

AS PAPÁ’S SNORES boomed off the clapboard walls, Catalina slid from her mattress and groped her way to the front door. The latch clicked softly. The girl waited a moment to see if any of her family would wake, but nobody stirred. Catalina stood on the doorstep of their Cerro Tololo observatory staff housing, drinking in deep lungfuls of the clear night air under the blazing Southern Hemisphere starshine. The Milky Way sprawled across the sky, a swath of pure white lace shadowed by dark blotches. Night was her favorite time. During the day the Chilean mountaintop swarmed with tourists, shouting and calling to each other as breezes spun dust into the thin mountain air. While the visitors were there, Papá could not allow her to help polish the brass…

Hey, Everybuggy! I absolutely love Cricket, dogs, books, and summer. To all the LOTR readers: my family loves The Lord of the Rings. I’ve read all the books and watched all the movies! Also, my eight-year-old sister is named Arwen, from LOTR! To Sabine (January 2022): My family also likes Star Wars and Marvel. My baby brother’s name is Lucas George, after George Lucas! His room is also fully Star Wars decorated. I also love your name! A series I recommend is Endling: The Last by Katherine Applegate. The three books in it are: Endling: The Last, Endling: The First, and Endling: The Only. My two fave dogs are Aussies and corgis. They’re adorable. Are there any other readers who like those? Shadowfax, age 12 winters Dover, Delaware Dear Everybuggy,…

HOW FAR CAN you see? On a clear day, the song goes, you can see forever. On a dark night, maybe you can’t see your hand in front of your face. If you’re sharp-eyed, you might glimpse the Great Galaxy in Andromeda—only 2,200,000 light-years away; or the Spiral in Triangulum, a bit farther. Beyond that, we need help. As early as the thirteenth century, astronomers experimented with glass lenses to make distant objects look closer. The first telescope, according to many historians, was invented in 1608 by a Dutch optician, Hans Lippershey. The following year, inspired by Lippershey, the Italian astronomer Galileo began putting together his own telescopes. With them, he saw the rings of Saturn, some satellites of Jupiter, and the craters of the moon. In England, Sir Isaac…

THREE MONTHS, TWENTY-FOUR days, and seventeen hours ago, I died. When the hovercraft crashed with me and my parents inside, my brain was destroyed. The doctors put me on life support: a jungle of tubes and wires telling my body when to eat, breathe, and pump blood. I became a vegetable, lying motionless on a hovertrolley, unaware that my parents—and all my memories of them—were gone. I stayed like that for a week, until a three-inch metal cube arrived at the hospital’s shipping dock. My new brain. My new brain came with other new things. A new surname, since my grandfather was my official guardian now. A new town, high in the Chubu Mountains of the Koreapan Peninsula. A new school, with lots of new friends—at least, I thought they…

TEN-YEAR-OLD VERA COOPER felt a quiver of excitement when she saw the bedroom she and her older sister, Ruth, would share in their family’s new house in Washington, D.C. Its large window faced north and allowed for a view of the night sky unimpeded by objects and the city’s lights. Vera would be able to observe the stars! She positioned her bed right against the window. The house’s celestial views would intrigue and delight her and set her off on a lifelong journey to advance astronomy. Vera would eventually explain properties of galaxies and reveal the presence of nonluminous material in the universe called dark matter—a discovery that would fundamentally alter our understanding of the cosmos. Even as a little girl, Vera had a penchant for gazing up and asking…

First prize 10 and under Joanie Sacks, age 9 Portland, ME Mother Nature, the Painter She flew through the evening sky and landed on a lacey white cloud with a job to do. She dipped her paintbrush into the glistening water below her. Then Mother Nature started. A mural of sorts, the blank white sky as her canvas and a branch from the finest evergreen tree in hand. She started, first light blue, dark blue, every blue. She blended the amazing colors and splashed them on with the ease of a tree swaying to the wind. Slowly Mother Nature descended on a gleaming waterfall as it slid peacefully through the evening sky, to take a short break before going back to paint again. It was Mother Nature’s lifelong job she…