Cool Story Programs for the School-Age Crowd


Book Description

Offers eighteen offbeat literary programs featuring creepy, dirty, and stinky stories that will appeal to young readers.




Folktales Retold


Book Description

Folktales and fairy tales are living stories; as part of the oral tradition, they change and evolve as they are retold from generation to generation. In the last thirty years, however, revision has become an art form of its own, with tales intentionally revised to achieve humorous effect, send political messages, add different cultural or regional elements, try out new narrative voices, and more. These revisions take all forms, from short stories to novel-length narratives to poems, plays, musicals, films and advertisements. The resulting tales paint the tales from myriad perspectives, using the broad palette of human creativity. This study examines folktale revisions from many angles, drawing on examples primarily from revisions of Western European traditional tales, such as those of the Grimm Brothers and Charles Perrault. Also discussed are new folktales that combine traditional storylines with commentary on modern life. The conclusion considers how revisionists poke fun at and struggle to understand stories that sometimes made little sense to start with.




The Little Corporal


Book Description




Mildred Pierce


Book Description

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men, and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter.




GRIEVE WITH UNDERSTANDING


Book Description

God had made up his mind. No one could do anything to cure Mona’s mother. Her cancer had returned aggressively, and all one could do was accept God’s will. Was Mona’s faith being tested, or had God failed her? Was God the creator or a destroyer? Mona gradually began to understand all the answers to her questions as her mother’s soul prepared to journey into the next realm. The spiritual experiences she witnessed during the time assured her that her loved ones would always be with her in spirit and they would reunite once their journey ended.




Little Red Riding Hood Death by Misadventure


Book Description

Little Red Riding Hood is not who she seems. With crooked town officials, there are plans to change the face of Grandmother’s forest forever. As murder lurks in the shadows, the question on everyone’s mind is: where is the great Wolf? And where is the woodsman, who is supposed to protect the forest and its inhabitants?




How to Deal with Bullies Superhero-Style


Book Description

Zach is a kid just like you and me, but when Zach sees others being teased or bullied, he imagines himself a superhero and comes to the rescue. With powerful words, "No teasing, No hitting! That's just wrong!" Zach helps his friends learn to use words for good and not to fight back or say mean things; since bullies like that. Now the friends are empowered to defend themselves just like their Superhero friend Zach.




She's Come Undone


Book Description

Meet Dolores Price. She's thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the chocolate, crisps and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up. In his extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch an incredible ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably loveable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections.




Lone Wolf's Run


Book Description

When a vicious serial-killer comes looking for John 'Wolf' Trotter and his biker brothers, she has more than torture and death in mind. This time, she's backed up by a well-trained paramilitary band of disciples fueled by their own hatred. Wolf, a writer named for his passion for riding the back roads as a lone-wolf biker, has a troubled past. It started when he and his friends brought a killer for hire's career to a sudden end. Blondie, the dead assassin's unique and illusive partner, has devised a plan that will destroy the fragile trust among motorcycle clubs, the police, and the public that has taken decades to build. When Wolf and his buddies try to lure this devious chameleon out, bodies begin to pile up in apparently unrelated incidents. While the authorities spin their wheels, Wolf and his brothers devise their own risky plan. Will it derail the growing national threat before it sparks a bloody conflict that could be impossible to stop and almost certain to get them killed? Delivering more than just suspense and excitement, Lone Wolf's Run is an innovative hybrid thriller that skillfully incorporates safety advice and actual unique destinations into the plot-map included. "Lone Wolf's Run put me on my motorcycle ... Strange is the experience that teaches one to value riding safety while witnessing unexpected mayhem in the riding community." -Larry Lindsey, legislative director, Alabama ABATE, MSF rider/coach