Excerpt from Zebra Forest by Adina Rishe Gewirtz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Rew didn't want to hear about a grandpa with a hurt heart, though. And so one day that year I agreed that our grandpa had been a pirate and that Gran got her treasure from a treasure box he'd left, which was still buried out on the edge of the Zebra.

"Is that why she lets everyone call her Morgan?" he asked me, thinking it over. "Like Adele Parks and them?"When we had first registered for school, Gran had put us down under the name Morgan, which had been her name before she married Grandpa Snow, when she lived in Chicago. "My mother would have liked to be remembered that way" was all she said about it. And that was Gran. But at home, she never let us forget that we were Snows, and neither of us would have had it any other way. Snow had been our father's name, after all.

"That's right," I told Rew. "See, pirates never use their real names. You think Long John Silver's mother named him that? Course not. So Grandpa Snow's pirate name was Morgan, and he stamped that name right on his big treasure box, with the special seal pirates use. If Gran didn't use that name Morgan, that box wouldn't budge open. And so she keeps her pirate name, and that's how she gets at the treasure."

Rew grinned. "The old pirate Morgan. That's a great name. Where'd he sail? In the Atlantic?"

He sailed down to the islands," I told him. "To the Bermuda Triangle, where ships get lost at sea."

"And is that what happened to him? Did his ship get lost?"

I nodded. "Absolutely," I said. "It's a mystery right to this day. His ship was swallowed up, and no one ever saw it again."

Excerpted from Zebra Forest by Adina Rishe Gewirtz. Copyright © 2013 by Adina Rishe Gewirtz. Excerpted by permission of Candlewick Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.