Spies Behind Enemy Lines: Danger in the Darkest Hour (Magic Tree House House) by Mary Pope Osborne

"JUMP, JACK!" Teddy yelled.

Falling through the air, Jack forgot everything--legs together--face earth--arch back--spread arms--count to five. But miraculously, he remembered, Pull rip cord!

As the chute's white canopy opened above Jack, it yanked him backward. The billowing silk slowed his downward plunge. Jack clutched his field pack as he drifted through the night air.

The drone of the spy taxi engine faded into the distance. Teddy was gone. Not far away, Jack could see Annie in the moonlight, floating to earth. He was filled with as strange happiness as they both drifted in a dreamlike fall.

Suddenly the earth rose up to meet him. Jack hit the ground with a thud.

"We're in France! We did it!" Annie called from nearby.

When they unrolled the message from a little red canister delivered to them by carrier pigeon from 1945, Jack and Annie knew that they wouldn't be in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania, much longer.

This time the two time travelers are summoned, not on a Merlin mission, but on an undercover mission to help the French Resistance, alerting them to the coming D-Day Invasion that begins the end of World War II. The Magic Tree House delivers them to the Allied airbase at Glastonbury, England, where a huge air armada is about to take off to bomb Nazi installations and railroads in preparation for the invasion of Normandy. There they find their old friend, Teddy, in uniform as an agent of the Special Operations Executive, who asks them to parachute into the farming area near Caen to find Kathleen, who is missing on her mission with the French Resistance in the countryside about to be bombed by the Allies. Time is short, and Jack and Annie's special skills are needed to get her back to England before the Invasion.

Jack and Annie are shown the secret "V for Victory" sign to recognize the Resistance fighters and given only a cryptic rhyme and the promise of the help of the magic Wand of Dianthus.

Three miles east of Sir Kay's grave,

Cross a river to find a cave.

Look for knights and small, round cows--

A crack in the rock beneath the boughs.

It's only as the two are dangling from their chutes that they realize that Teddy has neglected to put the Wand in Jack's field pack. With no magic to help them, Jack and Annie realize that they are on their own behind Nazi lines and surrounded by truly deadly danger.

"I guess that means we'll have to help Kathleen without magic," said Annie. "But that's okay. We have lots of skills."

"Like what?" Jack asked grimly.

But the brother and sister find that they do have the right skills--to smile bravely and pretend to be French, to get people talking long enough to gather useful information, and to decode the rhyme and find Kathleen hiding a group of Jewish orphans in a cave accessed by the crack in the rocks by the river.

Now, their mission will be accomplished--if only Jack can resurrect his driving skills, learned in an old truck he was allowed to drive around the fields at Great-Grandpa's farm, well enough to drive an old bread truck loaded with Kathleen and the orphans through the Nazi checkpoint to the field where Teddy will land to take them back across the English Channel in the long night before the Longest Day.

In her new Magic Tree House Super Edition #1, best-selling author Mary Pope Osborne has the skills to take her beginning chapter book readers across the divide and into middle reader historical fiction. Used to the thrills, chills, and spills in the earlier and simpler series, Osborne's practiced readers will find themselves inside a darker historical fiction story where Annie and Jack are in real danger as they escape from the Nazis just in time to alert the French Resistance that it is time to start sabotaging railways, armament dumps, and bridges and tunnels to help the Allies establish a foothold in Europe.

Magic Tree House Super Edition #1: Danger in the Darkest Hour (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)) (Random House, 2015) drops young readers back into a time when the fate of Europe really hung in the balance and when the courage of many brave people saved the future world we now live in. An exciting and enlightening look back at a time that shaped our own, one from which most eyewitnesses are now vanishing, this rather realistic book makes a good introduction to the many novels and accounts of World War II waiting ahead for middle readers.

Got Milk? Fortunately the Milk by Neil Gaiman

There was only orange juice in the fridge. Nothing else that you could put on cereal, unless you think that ketchup or mayonnaise or pickle juice would be nice on your Toasties, which I do not and neither did my sister, although she has eaten some pretty weird things in her day.

When Dad discovers the milk deficiency, he sees that there's nothing for it but to make a hurried run to the corner convenience store for the milk.

The kids wait.    And wait.    And wait.

At last they hear the door.

"Where have you been all this time?" asked my sister.

"I bought the milk," said my father. "I walked out of the corner shop, and heard something odd that seemed to be coming from above me. It was a noise like this: thummthumm

I looked up and saw a huge silver disc hovering in the air above Marshall Road."

Before he can move, poor Dad is beamed up into a space ship filled with green, globby, grumpy aliens.

"Fortunately I had put the milk into my coat pocket."

The only escape from this grumpy group seems to be through an emergency exit which seems to the opening to the space-time continuum.

Fortunately the milk makes the transit, and it and Dad splashes down in the Sea of Something-or-Other, where he and the milk are pulled up onto the deck of pirate ship.  Declining the offer to become a buccaneer with them, he offers to walk the plank and just as he drops toward the circling sharks, a rope ladder drops from a hovering hot air balloon, with a time-traveling stegosaurus in command.  Fortunately the milk was pushed deep in my pocket, he reports, and it's up, up, and away until their balloon makes an unwise landing on a ritual sacrifice platform of a group of woolly-haired savages with menacing spears.

"Are there any ponies in this?" asked my sister. "I thought there would be ponies by now."

Why, yes. There are, and and in the best tradition of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, many another weird encounter with volcanoes and angry gods and wumpires with sharp teeth, and a just-in-time time machine, but fortunately the milk and Dad arrive back home just in time for breakfast, in Neil Gaiman's latest fantasy, Fortunately, the Milk (Harper, 2013). Ilustrated in decidedly but deliciously quirky illustrations by Skottie Young, executed in a dark  Dr. Seuss-ish style, this tall tale ends humorously, with Dad getting in the last shot at his two young skeptics.

I looked at my sister and my sister looked at me.

We looked around the kitchen.  At the calendar on the wall with the hot air balloons on it.  At my dinosaur models and my sister's ponies and vampire book, at the picture of a volcano I painted  still on the fridge.

"You know, we don't believe any of this," said my sister.

My father shrugged.  "It was all true.  And I can prove it.

Here's the MILK."