Best Selling Books by Richard Peck

A young girl living on a Vermont farm relates the events of the day her uncle brought her a genuine "Junior G-man machine gun."

With a star-studded lineup of writers, there’s a stage full of drama, comedy, and great storytelling waiting behind these curtains! Sharon Creech spoofs a publishing office in The Raven, and the environment fights back against overdevelopment in Susan Cooper’s The Dollop. Patricia MacLachlan puts a twist on detention in The Bad Room, and Katherine Paterson revives a classic fairy tale in The Billionaire and the Bird. Richard Peck has schoolboys doing their best to trick a spooky substitute in Effigy in the Outhouse, and Avi’s Not Seeing Is Believing has words playing tricks on everybody. There’s something for everyone in this all-star lineup.

When Jessica''s parents divorce and her father leaves, Jessica decides that the best way to punish her mother is to retreat to her room, a shrine to her glamorous traveling photographer dad. Then Jessica''s mother offers to let her visit her father in Mexico for the holidays, at the fabulous house of her father''s uncle Lucius, a famous painter. Jessica is thrilled. Once there, she falls under the spell of Lucius''s home, and his Christmas guests, Brooke and Tony, who are college age. Together the three young people race around Acapulco in an old Jeep, swim, and go dancing. It''s paradise. Except for dad. Here in paradise he''s not the father Jessica dreamed of at all....

In her new high school, where her mother has taken a job as counselor, Chelsa experiences joys and sorrows as she makes choices about new friends and learns they are not always what they seem.

When teenage beauty Darlene Hoffmeister wins a beauty contest and is offered a glamorous life in New York City with her friend Verna, both girls have some major re-thinking to do about their lives and values.

Chillicothe, Ohio, founded in 1796, became the capital of the Northwest Territory in 1800 and the capital of Ohio in 1803. Cheap land in the Virginia Military District drew settlers to the area in the 1790s. These early settlers came to the Chillicothe area with the idea of building a new state, and the State of Ohio constitution was signed in Chillicothe in 1803. Chillicothe was the capital of Ohio for two separate periods of time: 1803-1810 and 1812-1816. This visual history of Chillicothe contains over 220 historic images, including maps dating back to 1783 that illustrate land claims made by Virginia and other states. The images presented herein take the reader through the days of the Ohio and Erie Canal, the high time of the railroad, and the period when Camp Sherman, a World War I training camp, was located just north of town. Many of the buildings pictured survive and are preserved as part of Chillicothe''s downtown business district. With the exception of the presence of automobiles, many of the street scenes look almost the same today as they did in the mid-1800s. Chillicothe survives today as a city with a population of over 22,000, in the midst of many historical attractions and a major, annual outdoor drama called Tecumseh.

Blossom, high school freshman and possessor of "second sight," helps an Egyptian princess, dead for 3500 years, to regain her tomb, and in addition saves a suffragette school teacher from losing her job in 1914.

Rob manages Soup''s campaign for class president in their small Vermont town.

A textbook using a variety of problems, activities, and exercises to introduce the techniques of creative writing.

The popular author describes how he grew up in Decatur, Illinois, went into teaching, and eventually became a writer, incorporating his earlier experiences into novels intended to reach and change young readers.

In 1913 in the Midwest a quartet of characters share adventures from exploding steamboats to "exorcizing" a ghost.

In rural Indiana in 1904, fifteen-year-old Russell''s dream of quitting school and joining a wheat threshing crew is disrupted when his older sister takes over the teaching at his one-room schoolhouse after mean, old Myrt Arbuckle "hauls off and dies."

In 1893, thirteen-year-old Rosie and members of her family travel from their Illinois farm to Chicago to visit Aunt Euterpe and attend the World''s Columbian Exposition which, along with an encounter with Buffalo Bill and Lillian Russell, turns out to be a life-changing experience for everyone.

A very small mouse of unknown origins runs away from school in the Royal Mews of Buckingham Palace shortly before the celebration of Queen Victoria''s diamond jubilee, celebrating her sixty years on the British throne.