Mac Barnett

Miles Murphy is not happy to be moving to Yawnee Valley, a sleepy town that's famous for one thing and one thing only: cows. In his old school, everyone knew him as the town's best prankster, but Miles quickly discovers that Yawnee Valley already has a prankster, and a great one. If Miles is going to take the title from this mystery kid, he is going to have to raise his game. It's prankster against prankster in an epic war of trickery, until the two...

"Friends and pranking partners Miles and Niles face a tough challenge when their favorite goat and nemesis, Principal Barkin, is replaced by his stern, no-nonsense father, Former Principal Barkin, who turns the school into boot camp"--

One day, Mac (smartest boy in his class in a small town in California) receives a telephone call from the Queen of England, recruiting him to find the crown jewels (well, actually just the Coronation Spoon) and so Mac embarks on his first adventure as a secret agent--with the assurance that the Queen will give him a note excusing him from school.

When his friend Circle asks him to do her portrait after praising him as a sculptor and genius, Square struggles to carve her likeness from a stone block.

Leo is a friendly house ghost--but when a family moves into his house, and tries to get rid of him, he leaves and roams the city looking for a friend.

When a child is too full of questions about the world to go to sleep, her patient father offers up increasingly creative responses to his child's nighttime wonderings.

There is a legend that if the ravens at the Tower of London ever leave then Britain will fall, so when somebody steals the birds, the Queen calls for Mac B. to find the thief and retrieve them--a mission that takes him to Iceland, where he encounters secret submarines, hungry polar bears, and his arch-nemesis from the KGB.

́€œWe woń€™t stop digging until we find something spectacular,́€� Dave says to Sam. They dig their hole deepeŕ€"and even sidewayś€"but they keep just missing what theý€™re looking for.

To crack a secret code, Mac follows the clues to France and Japan where he must use his gaming skills and defeat his enemy, the KGB Man.

"What is love?" a young boy asks. "I can't answer that," his grandmother says, and so the boy goes out into the world to find out. But while each person he meets—the fisherman, the actor, and others—has an answer to his question, not one seems quite right. Could love really be a fish, or applause, or the night? Or could it actually be something much closer to home?