New Releases by Gary D. Schmidt

In this Newbery Honor-winning novel, Gary D. Schmidt tells the witty and compelling story of a teenage boy who feels that fate has it in for him, during the school year 1968-68. Seventh grader Holling Hoodhood isn''t happy. He is sure his new teacher, Mrs. Baker, hates his guts. Holling''s domineering father is obsessed with his business image and disregards his family. Throughout the school year, Holling strives to get a handle on the Shakespeare plays Mrs. Baker assigns him to read on his own time, and to figure out the enigmatic Mrs. Baker. As the Vietnam War turns lives upside down, Holling comes to admire and respect both Shakespeare and Mrs. Baker, who have more to offer him than he imagined. And when his family is on the verge of coming apart, he also discovers his loyalty to his sister, and his ability to stand up to his father when it matters most.

In 1911, Turner Buckminster hates his new home of Phippsburg, Maine, but things improve when he meets Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from a poor, nearby island community founded by former slaves that the town fathers--and Turner''s--want to change into a tourist spot.

Turner Buckminster is purely miserable. Not only is he the son of the new minister in a small Maine town, but he is shunned for playing baseball differently from the local boys.

In a literary environment dominated by men, the first American to earn a living as a writer and to establish a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic was, miraculously, a woman. Hannah Adams dared to enter--and in some ways was forced to enter--a sphere of literature that had, in eighteenth-century America, been solely a male province. Driven by poverty and necessity, and aided by an extraordinarily adept mind and keen sense of business, Adams authored works on New England history, sectarian history, and Jewish history, using and citing the most recent scholarly works being published in Great Britain and America. As a female writer, she would always remain something of an outsider, but her accomplishments did not by any means go unrecognized: embraced by the Boston intelligentsia and highly regarded throughout New England, Adams came to epitomize the possibility in a democratic society that anyone could rise to a circle of intellectual elites. In A Passionate Usefulness, the first book-length biography of this remarkable figure, Gary Schmidt focuses primarily on the intimate connection between Adams''s reading and her own literary work. Hers is the story of incipient scholarship in the new nation, the story of a dependence that evolved into intellectual independence. Schmidt sets Adams''s works in the context of her early poverty and desperate family situation, her decade-long feud with one of New England''s most powerful Calvinist ministers, her alliance with the budding Unitarian movement in Boston, and her work establishing the first evangelical mission to Palestine (a task she accomplished virtually single-handedly). Today Adams still holds a place not only as a female writer who made her way economically in the book business before any other woman--or male writer--could do so, but also as a key figure in the transitional generation between the American Revolution and the Renaissance upon whose groundwork much of the country''s later literature would build.

Edging the Boundaries is a genre-based children''s literature sourcebook that emphasizes issues in thinking and writing about the literary qualities of children''s literature.This book examines the field by defining and discussing literature genres and their qualities. This book includes information and issues about literary genres, writing/thinking opportunities, teaching pointers for classroom use, and examples of the best authors and illustrators in each genre.For elementary school educators, or anyone interested in the genre of children''s literature.

This beautiful book weaves together faith and wonder, miracles and mystery, to tell the little-known story of Saint Ciaran of Ireland.

Leaving behind a prosperous life in England, William Bradford and the other Pilgrims traveled on the Mayflower to a strange land in search of religious freedom. There Bradford established a stable colony, trying to be fair to both the colonists and the local Native Americans.