Rather, like Spinelli's fiction, its appeal lies in the accessibility and universality of his life. Entertaining and fast-paced, this is a highly readable memoir-- a must-have for Spinelli fans of all ages. Only once logged in you get a variety of other books too. This Italian-American Newbery Medalist presents a humorous account of his childhood and youth in Norristown, Pennsylvania. She sparks a school-spirit revolution with just one cheer. The students of Mica High are enchanted.
At first. Then they turn on her. Stargirl is suddenly shunned for everything that makes her different, and Leo, panicked and desperate with love, urges her to become the very thing that can destroy her: normal. In this celebration of nonconformity, Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli weaves a tense, emotional tale about the perils of popularity and the thrill and inspiration of first love.
No writer guides his young characters, and his readers, past these pitfalls and challenges and toward their futures with more compassion. Love, Stargirl picks up a year after Stargirl ends and reveals the new life of the beloved character who moved away so suddenly at the end of Stargirl. The novel takes the form of 'the world's longest letter,' in diary form, going from date to date through a little more than a year's time.
In her writing, Stargirl mixes memories of her bittersweet time in Mica, Arizona, with involvements with new people in her life. In Love, Stargirl, we hear the voice of Stargirl herself as she reflects on time, life, Leo, and - of course - love. From Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli Maniac Magee, Stargirl comes the 'moving and memorable' Kirkus Reviews, starred story of a girl searching for happiness inside the walls of a prison.
She spends the mornings hanging out with shoplifters and reformed arsonists in the women's excercise yard, which gives Cammie a certain cache with her school friends. But even though Cammie's free to leave the prison, she's still stuck. And sad, and really mad. Her mother died saving her from harm when she was just a baby. You wouldn't think you could miss something you never had, but on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, the thing Cammie most wants is a mom.
A prison might not be the best place to search for a mother, but Cammie is determined and she's willing to work with what she's got. Fame, good and bad fortune, friendship and mental illness all make their way into [Cammie's] narrative.
Presents a moral question with great care and sensitivity. But for Palmer, his tenth birthday is not something to look forward to, but something to dread. Then one day, a visitor appears on his windowsill, and Palmer knows that this, more than anything else, is a sign that his time is up. Somehow, he must learn how to stop being afraid and stand up for what he believes in. Wringer is a powerful tour de force from Newbery Medal winner Jerry Spinelli.
This Father's Day show dad how much you care with this gift-book celebrating the moments you share! I can't wait for my daddy to come home from work. There are so many things to do! In a loving tribute to fathers and sons, Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli and New Yorker artist Seymour Chwast join talents to celebrate the very best moment of the day: when daddy comes home. Gary Paulsen has owned dozens of unforgettable and amazing dogs, and here are his favorites--one to a chapter.
Among them are Snowball, the puppy he owned as a boy in the Philippines; Ike, his mysterious hunting companion; Electric Fred and his best friend, Pig; Dirk, the grim protector; and Josh, one of the remarkable border collies working on Paulsen's ranch today.
My Life in Dog Years is a book for every dog lover and every Paulsen fan--a perfect combination that shows vividly the joy and wisdom that come from growing up with man's best friend. West End The West End became more than my home and neighborhood. It became my New World. No coonskin pathfinder ever explored his patch of earth more thoroughly than I explored mine.
The address was George Street, second house in from Elm. Another brick row house, another brick sidewalk. For ten years I would live there, from ages six to sixteen.
The block was the last block on George Street. It was a dead end. Beyond the last house the asphalt stopped. A three-foot-high wooden barrier made it official. To a grownup it meant Stop—Turn the Car Around.
Before the wooden barrier was the structured, orderly world of grownups, the neat grid of streets and houses that gave shape to their lives. Past the barrier was frontier. Climb over the fence or simply walk around it, as a car could not, and you found yourself in knee-high weeds. This swatch of undeveloped land featured not one but two dumps, plus a swamp, Red Hill, the spear field, the stone piles, and a black and white pony.
Who needed playgrounds? And lucky me, the portal to this kid-size continent was the dead end of my new street named George. I spent much of the next ten years in this houseless, streetless wilderness and in the park on the other side of the creek.
Sometimes I was with others, sometimes alone. By the time the ten years were up, I had caught a handful of salamanders, hit a home run, raced against my stopwatch, searched for the Devil, kissed a girl, and bled from an attack of leeches. But I did not go to sleep on the frontier side of the dead-end fence, or wake up there, or go to school there. And that was okay, because the civilized side also had something that seemed expressly made for me and my playmates, geographic features that appeared on no map, had no names, yet were intimately familiar to all kids in the neighborhood.
Seen from above, they would appear as a second, nameless grid overlaid on the public one. I speak of alleyways. To me and the neighborhood kids, the back of a house was more important than the front, and we happily roamed the alleyways that bordered our backyards.
Alleys were sized to make us comfortable—with a running start, you could practically broad-jump across some of them. In an alley it was the car, not the kid, that was the intruder. Alleys were for sneakers and bikes and trikes and wagons.
Alleys had no rules, no signs. Danger and parental interference were minimal. You could lie on your back in the middle of an alley if you wanted to and close your eyes for five minutes and not be run over. You could hang the frame of an old wooden chair from a telephone pole spike and use it as a basketball rim.
In an alley you could practice riding your new bike in peace, then ram it into potholes and get yourself thrown, like a bronco buster. If you wanted.
If you ran away from home, or planned to, you would go by alleyway. You could go anywhere—for all I knew, clear across the country. With the frontier and the park and the alleys available to us, you might think we would stay off the streets. We did not, of course. Because, in truth, our territory was wherever we happened to be. Whichever side of the dead end we were on, whichever side of the door, we confiscated the turf and made it our own.
And so, if we felt like resting, we would alight like a small flock of birds onto the nearest front steps. Except for those at the house directly across the street from For reasons too vague for words, we were afraid of the man who lived there.
His front steps were never sat on, his sidewalk never hopscotched, his doorbell never rung, his backyard fence never climbed. The truth was, he was simply a widowed barber who preferred to keep his shades down all the time, but try telling that to us.
Ten years, from six to sixteen. Ten years in the West End. War I hate war. But when I was little, I loved it. War was a game, guns were toys, death an amusement ride. The first card game I ever played was called war. I also played with little green soldiers, maybe two inches high. I loved their perfect, tiny helmets that reminded me of cereal bowls.
Even the faces of the soldiers were perfect and green. Their tiny mouths and eyes were forever locked into a battlefield moment that I could only imagine. I read G. Joe and Combat Kelly comic books. And of course, I played war with my friends. Beyond the dead end, there were two major arsenals: the stone piles and the spear field.
The stone piles were on the other side of the tracks, between the main dump and the creek. There were five of them, each about ten feet high. The piles no doubt belonged to a construction company, but as far as we dead-end kids were concerned, they were there strictly in answer to our instinct to fling a stone. We divided ourselves into two platoons and took up positions on either side of the creek. We loaded up and fired away.
The creek at that point was hardly wider than an alleyway. Across the water Johnny Seeton was firing from behind a tree. I waited till he poked his head out. He was looking right at me. I fired. I was aiming to hit him in the eyebrow. Besides, Johnny Seeton was one of my two best friends. And double-besides, who ever actually hit what they were aiming at? The stone hit him in the eyebrow.
He screamed. Blood streamed down his face. He galloped across the water, ignoring stepping stones, screamed up the creek bank, and screamed all the way home. As fo r me, pretend did not give way to horror instantly.
For several seconds of fanciful confusion, as Johnny Seeton thrashed wildly past me, I felt surprised that our relationship as best friends did not seem to count in this matter, as if a stone thrown by me should hurt him less.
Neither Johnny nor his parents ever said anything to me about the incident. Spears were safer. Go to the dead end, turn left, walk up the tracks past Red Hill and the other, smaller dump, climb the trackside bluff, and you were in the spear field—so named for the plants growing there.
Strip one of them of its leaves, and you were left with a sturdy four-foot-high stalk straight as a pool cue. Pluck it from the ground, shake off the root dirt, and bring on the enemy.
As I passed through the grade-school years, war became less about machine-gun chatter and spectacular explosions and more about people.
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