Jennifer Murdley’s Toad by Bruce Coville
This may well be my favourite of the MAGIC SHOP books, a series of standalone stories that feature a young boy or girl entering Mr Elives’ Magic Shop and leaving with a strange artefact of some kind — one which will have taught them an important life-lesson by the end of the book (though not before causing them a heap of trouble in the interim).
Perhaps the best thing about the series is that each book is surprisingly different in tone. For instance,
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