The Very Fairy Princess Follows Her Heart

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Jerome Brooks

Infatuated with the teacher who placed her in an honors program, fifteen-year-old Hope becomes spokesman for the gifted students when trouble appears to be simmering between that teacher and another in the program.

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Larry Heinemann

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed--but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco's Story--winner of a National Book Award--plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Ron Clark

Award-winning teacher and bestselling author Clark ("The Essential 55") presents a riveting new book providing rules for parents and teachers to help kids succeed in school.

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Edgardo Vega Yunqué

"This sweeping drama of intimately connected families --black, white, and Latino-- boldly conjures up the ever-shifting cultural mosaic that is America. At its heart is Vidama̕ Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who sets out in search of the father she has never known. Her journey takes her from her affluent home to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her father Billy Farrell now lives with his second family. Once a gifted jazz pianist, Billy lost two fingers in the Vietnam War and has since shut himself off from jazz. Vidama̕ struggles to bring her father back to the world of jazz. Her quest gives her a new understanding of family, particularly through her half-sisters Fawn, a lonely young poet plagued with a secret, and Cookie, a sassy, streetsmart homegirl who happens to be "white." And when Vidama̕ becomes involved with a young African-American jazz saxophonist, she is forced to explore her own complex roots, along with the dizzying contradictions of race etched in the American psyche"--Publisher's description.