Having lost himself in extreme sports since the death of his wife, sculptor Tim Overleigh joins a team of men bent on climbing the Godesh Ridge in Nepal in order to stop his downward spiral, only to find what was supposed to be a journey based in Tibetan mysticism to be an experiment in terror.
In this unique memoir, the adventuresome author combines stories of rural Kentucky and restless travel with tall tales of other worlds and bygone eras. Bob Thompson discovered his passion for storytelling on the front porch of his Granny's country store in McCracken County, Kentucky. Absorbing the tales and traditions he learned there, he kept them close as he went out in search of stories and life experiences of his own. In Hitchhiker, Thompson offers readers homegrown tales that interweave ghosts of the past with real and imagined worlds far beyond his grandmother’s porch. The stories progress from Bob’s Tom Sawyer-esque childhood in Western Kentucky through his restless wanderings as a hitchhiking hippie to his adulthood as an unrepentant adventurer following the footsteps of Hemingway and the Lost Generation across Europe. This collection brings together coming-of-age tales, family stories of bygone eras, and even true accounts of unsolved murders and mysteries. Hitchhiker is Huckleberry Finn meets The Twilight Zone, with just a taste of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
In the tradition of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, a dazzling debut novel about the family bonds that remain even when they seem irretrievably torn apart Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister Mabel have no one but each other—with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and reverberate through three generations of women. What happens when nothing turns out as you planned? From the Depression through World War II and Vietnam, and smaller events both tragic and joyful, Bertie and Mabel forge unexpected identities that are shaped by unspeakable secrets. As the sisters have daughters and granddaughters of their own, they discover that both love and betrayal are even more complicated than they seem. Gorgeously written, with extraordinary insight and emotional truth, Nancy Jensen's powerful debut novel illuminates the far-reaching power of family and family secrets.
Build relationships between students and their community, while encouraging the development of important life skills. This resource helps you integrate service learning into your curriculum. After defining service learning and connecting research to practical classroom applications, the authors give you the tools to launch your own program. Appropriate literature, activities lists of suggested projects, and more are included. Grades 4-6.
The Doofus and the Divine By: Darcy Phillips In the quiet, dying, sleepy town of Placard in Eastern Montana (objectively the boring side of the state), 19-year-old Oliver Digby wakes to find a stranger in his house. Emmanuel is no ordinary stranger, though. He can close windows and break doorknobs off doors with his mind. …Oh, and he claims to be the next Son of God. Mesmerized yet reluctant, Oliver decides to be this young savior’s guide to humanity, even though his social skills are not exactly great. But off this doofus and his dubious divine savior embark on a journey to discover their fate, and perhaps even save the world in the process. The Doofus and the Divine is a very humorous and yet thoughtful tale of two unlikely heroes and the very unlikely bond they come to share. Illustrated by the author
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2020 “A comically dark coming-of-age story about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, but it’s also social commentary at its finest, woven seamlessly into the work . . . Bump’s meditation on belonging and not belonging, where or with whom, how love is a way home no matter where you are, is handled so beautifully that you don’t know he’s hypnotized you until he’s done.” —Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America. Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.