The document provides summaries of 12 children's books that were nominated for the Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award. The summaries describe stories about children struggling with friendship, bullying, disabilities, family difficulties, and adjusting to new environments. They deal with themes of overcoming challenges, finding one's talents, and learning life lessons.

1. 2009-2010Maud Hart LovelaceBook Nominees

2. Riley struggles to make his father proud, despite his poor athletic abilities, but when he meets Champ, a three-legged former show dog, Riley learns that winning doesn't always have to mean coming in first.

3. Frustrated at her seeming lack of talent for anything, a young Taiwanese American girl sets out to apply the lessons of the Chinese Year of the Dog, those of making best friends and finding oneself, to her own life.

4. While sorting through difficulties in her friendship with her neighbor Margaret, eight-year-old Clementine gains several unique hairstyles while also helping her father in his efforts to banish pigeons from the front of their apartment building.

5. Georgie's dwarfism causes problems, but he could always rely on his parents, his best friend, and classmate Jeanie the Meanie's teasing, until a surprising announcement, a new boy in school, and a class project shake things up.

6. Kek, an African refugee, is confronted by many strange things at the Minneapolis home of his aunt and cousin, as well as in his fifth-grade classroom, and longs for his missing mother, but finds comfort in the company of a cow and her owner.

7. While his widowed mother continues to search for him, eleven-year-old Tom, presumed dead after drifting away down a river, finds himself trapped in a series of underground caves with another survivor and a dog, and pursued by murderous treasure-hunters.

8. Gabriel, a white boy who is being bullied, and Frita, an African-American girl facing prejudice, decide to overcome their many fears together as they enter fifth grade in Georgia in 1976.

9. Four fifth-grade students--a geek, a class clown, a teacher's pet, and a slacker--as well as their teacher and mothers, each relate events surrounding a computer programmed to complete homework assignments.

10. Self-proclaimed genius inventor Alex decides to build a cardboard spaceship to escape his annoying little brother.

11. Frustrated at life with an autistic brother, twelve-year-old Catherine longs for a normal existence but her world is further complicated by a friendship with an young paraplegic.

12. While attending a strict academy for potential princesses with the other girls from her mountain village, fourteen-year-old Miri discovers unexpected talents and connections to her homeland.

13. When Emmy discovers that she and her formerly loving parents are being drugged by their evil nanny with rodent potions that can change people in frightening ways, she and some new friends must try everything possible to return things to normal.

14. Text and Images found at:http://www.flr.follett.com/on Sept. 14, 2009