Not every gift is a blessing. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite. But they don't laugh. Melanie is a very special girl.

Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo's...

Thanks to the encouragement of Ms. Coco, the gifted and talented teacher, A.J. becomes a popular school poet during National Poetry Month.

When Ever Wong's parents sent her away for the summer, she's expecting Chien Tan: a strict, educational immersion program in Taiwan. Instead, she finds the infamous "Loveboat." There, Ever is surrounded by prodigies, like Rick Woo, Chinese American wonder boy and longtime bane of her existence; Ever's roommate, the confident and clever Sophia Ha, as glamorous as she is sharp; and the intimidatingly cool Xavier Yeh, heir to an international tech empire....

Andrew "Ender" Wiggins is the result of a desperate breeding experiment, combined with years of harsh and unforgiving training. Ender thinks he is only playing computer simulated war games--in fact, he is commanding the last great fleet to earth. In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" lives with his kind...

Eighth-grader Franny and her friends investigate why most of the students at their exclusive boarding school are brilliant, beautiful, and perfectly behaved.

"During a briefing in Washington D.C., the President is informed of a threat to national security: a three-year-old boy named Akili, who is already the smartest being on the planet. Representing the next step in human evolution, Akili can perceive patterns and predict future events better than most supercomputers, and is capable of manipulating grand-scale events like pieces on a chess board. And yet, for all that power, Akili has the emotional maturity...

A mysterious child teaches two strangers how to love and trust again. After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. When a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin, barefoot and covered in bruises, Joanna enlists the help of her reclusive neighbor, Gabriel Nash, to solve the...

"Sixteen-year-old Sage is a lonely child. Her adoptive parents watch her obsessively, as if studying her for warning signs of...something. And maybe they're right to--even she can't make sense of the strange things she sees and hears. She possesses knowledge that other teenagers don't, that her parents and teachers--no adult--could possibly have. So when Sage finally makes a friend who understands her alarming gift, he becomes her confidant, a precarious...

"Like Big Little Lies with standardized testing, this addictive novel digs hard into the culture of striving parents and anxious children, exploring privilege, competition and the elusiveness of happiness. A deeply pleasurable read."-Meg Wolitzer. "This deliciously sharp novel captures the relentless ambitions and fears that animate parents and their children in modern America, exploring the conflicts between achievement and potential, talent and...