Is That You, Miss Blue?


Book Description

A teenager whose parents have separated tries to adapt to life at a boarding school and make a fresh start in a strange new place After her mother runs off with her much-younger boyfriend, fourteen-year-old Flanders is shipped off to a boarding school in Virginia. On the train, she meets Carolyn Cardmaker, a preacher’s daughter who will become her best friend. She also meets Ernestine Blue. Miss Blue is Flanders’s faculty advisor at the Charles School, where each residence hall is named after a Charles Dickens novel. But Miss Blue’s strict disciplinarian persona may be concealing a tragic past. As Flanders adjusts to life at school—which includes a deaf roommate and a terrifying blind date—she discovers surprising things about Miss Blue . . . and herself. A coming-of-age novel that transcends the ordinary in its perceptive, empathetic depiction of Flanders and the people in her life, Is That You, Miss Blue? takes us into a world where not everyone can be taken at face value—and where strangers can become unexpected friends. This ebook features an illustrated personal history of M. E. Kerr including rare images from the author’s collection.







Meet ClaraBelle Blue


Book Description

​Debut children's book from Adiba Nelson, "Meet ClaraBelle Blue" introduces your child to a sweet 3 year old with MUCHO moxie! She's determined to show her new friends that just because she's in a wheelchair, doesn't mean she can't have fun too!




Complete Croquet


Book Description

In its early days in Victorian England croquet was a game for the wealthy but competition from other sports - most notably tennis - the onset of two world wars, and a century of social change forced the game to adapt. Modern croquet is an intricate game of strategy, played socially within clubs and competitively at national and international level. The object of the game - to guide two balls round a circuit of loops - has changed little over the years but tactically, croquet has become much more complex, elaborate and fascinating. Complete Croquet is a comprehensive guide for the aspiring and improving croquet player. It deals with the basic skills, and how to avoid and eradicate common problems, as well as providing an in-depth coverage of modern tactics. The author focuses on the building blocks of break play, examining in detail how each element works before bringing it all together. There is advice on how to repair a bad situation when everything has gone wrong, how to exploit a good situation when everything is going well, and how to regain the initiative when the opponent is storming ahead. Whether your interest is in developing an understanding of top-class, championship-level tactics, in improving your play at handicap level, or even in just playing at home and wanting to get a better understanding of the game, Complete Croquet will prove to be invaluable. Superbly illustrated with 195 colour photographs and diagrams.




Will Santa Ever Ride Again?


Book Description







Disturbing the Universe


Book Description

The Young Adult novel is ordinarily characterized as a coming-of-age story, in which the narrative revolves around the individual growth and maturation of a character, but Roberta Trites expands this notion by chronicling the dynamics of power and repression that weave their way through YA books. Characters in these novels must learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they function, including family, church, government, and school. Trites argues that the development of the genre over the past thirty years is an outgrowth of postmodernism, since YA novels are, by definition, texts that interrogate the social construction of individuals. Drawing on such nineteenth-century precursors as Little Women and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Disturbing the Universe demonstrates how important it is to employ poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing adolescent literature, both in critical studies and in the classroom. Among the twentieth-century authors discussed are Blume, Hamilton, Hinton, Le Guin, L'Engle, and Zindel. Trites' work has applications for a broad range of readers, including scholars of children's literature and theorists of post-modernity as well as librarians and secondary-school teachers. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites is the winner of the 2002 Children's Literature Association's Book Award. The award is given annually in order to promote and recognize outstanding contributions to children's literature, history, scholarship, and criticisim; it is one of the highest academic honors that can accrue to an author of children's literary criticism.




All the Light We Cannot See


Book Description

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).




The Ink Truck


Book Description

A “wildly funny” novel of a monumentally unsuccessful newspaper strike in 1960s upstate New York from a Pulitzer Prize–winning author (People). The newspaper strike has stretched on for more than a year. When it began, the Guild boasted over 250 members. Now, they’re down to eighteen, with only three truly serious about the cause. Their leader, Bailey, is a columnist with an outsize sense of his own importance and a hatred of scabs that borders on fanaticism. Married to a roller derby queen, but smitten with one of his fellow radicals, Bailey is on a path of self-destruction that could take the entire city’s newspaper establishment down along with him. And that’s just what he has in mind. With the cape-wearing old-school Rosenthal at his side, Bailey embarks on a mad mission: hijacking the newspaper’s entire ink shipment and dumping it in the snow. But he’s hardly taken his first step when the scheme spins out of control, trapping him between armies of gypsies, scabs, and the wildest hippies New York has to offer. Set in a city closely resembling his native Albany, the fiction debut of William Kennedy is “a bawdy Celtic romp,” foreshadowing the wit and imagination that marked his literary career (Time).




The Sea Dragon


Book Description

Along the river, hundreds of huge cargo ships are moored in the port, and they have been discharged for a long time. Every cargo ship has lights on. From a distance, the scenery is quite spectacular.