Marie Rutkoski's startling debut novel, the first book in the Kronos Chronicles, about the risks we take to protect those we love, brims with magic, political intrigue, and heroism. Petra Kronos has a simple, happy life. But it's never been ordinary. She has a pet tin spider named Astrophil who likes to hide in her snarled hair and give her advice. Her best friend can trap lightning inside a glass sphere. Petra also has a father in faraway Prague who is able to move metal with his mind. He has been commissioned by the prince of Bohemia to build the world's finest astronomical clock. Petra's life is forever changed when, one day, her father returns home – blind. The prince has stolen his eyes, enchanted them, and now wears them. But why? Petra doesn't know, but she knows this: she will go to Prague, sneak into Salamander Castle, and steal her father's eyes back. Joining forces with Neel, whose fingers extend into invisible ghosts that pick locks and pockets, Petra finds that many people in the castle are not what they seem, and that her father's clock has powers capable of destroying their world. The Cabinet of Wonders is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Brimming with magic, political intrigue, and heroism, this debut novel kicks off a riveting new series featuring Petra Kronos, a young girl who risks everything to protect those she loves.

Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science.

When Prince Rodolfo's monsters attack her, Petra Kronos is spirited away to London. As she struggles to escape, Neel and Tomik sail the high seas, in search of her. Though separated by many miles, the three friends draw closer together in this sequel to The Cabinet of Wonders, called "astonishingly accomplished" by Publishers Weekly. Readers will not be disappointed in this adventure-filled novel that includes man-made monsters, the unraveling of a murder mystery, and the hunt for the Celestial Globe, which the prince of Bohemia will do anything to own.

Petra Kronos has a simple, happy life. But it's never been ordinary. She has a pet tin spider who likes to hide in her hair and give her advice. And her brilliant father has been commissioned by the prince of Bohemia to build the world's finest astronomical clock. When the prince steals her father’s eyes to wear them as his own, Petra sets off for Prague to steal her father's eyes back. And that is only the beginning of this series brimming with magic and adventure that Publishers Weekly called a "heady mix of history and enchantment." Includes all three books in the series, The Cabinet of Wonders, The Celestial Globe, and The Jewel of the Kalderash.

Exactly the book for every young explorer who loves finding stuff in nature and bringing it home. Cabinet of Curiosities is a lavishly illustrated introduction to the wonders of natural history and the joys of being an amateur scientist and collector. Nature writer Gordon Grice, who started his first cabinet of curiosities at age six when he found a skunk’s skull, explains how scientists classify all living things through the Linnaeus system; how to tell real gold from fool’s gold; how to preserve butterflies, crab shells, feathers, a robin’s egg, spider specimens, and honeycombs; how to identify seashells; the difference between antlers and horns; how to read animal tracks. And then, what to do with your specimens, including how to build a cabinet of curiosities out of common household objects, like a desk organizer or a box for fishing tackle.

Let the inimitable aesthete Viktor Wynd guide you through a subversive celebration of curiosities, art, mess, decay, and self indulgence, passionately arguing that the world is full of wonder that is in danger of being sanitized and that collectors are the ultimate artists. The book visits rarified locations lovingly curated by bohemians and artists: from a rambling Devon farmhouse and its historic taxidermy to an Italianate villa in East London to the House of Dreams Museum. It also includes advice on how to start a collection of your own, covering details on auction houses, private dealers, flea markets and fairs, and shows that having distinctive taste does not necessarily require a massive budget.