My Pal Shep

In 1968, the world was watching Captain Kangaroo and Dark Shadows. In Ronkonkoma, Long Island life was simple and carefree. Shep - our German Shepherd-Collie - came along at just the right time. For pet owners and pet lovers worldwide, no explanation is necessary. A good family pet becomes part of the family, part of the fabric of our lives. Its loss can be devastating - so we celebrate our lives together, and the important role these special dogs play in them. Relive the late 1960's - their turbulent times, life in the suburbs, and an appreciation of a special time and a very special family pet. Shep was the name of our family pet. What was yours?

Celebrates the accomplishments of YA authors acclaimed for producing high-quality comedies, who have not yet been treated in a book-length bio-critical study. Simultaneously, it reminds readers that no matter how funny an author of fiction may be, if he shows off his wit in ways that fail to play a natural role in advancing his narrative, he is not writing good fiction. To demonstrate this, humorous passages are presented to illustrate the contribution a sense of humor can make to a work of fiction. The book is arranged topically to facilitate a comparison of distinctive treatments by various authors of adolescent life events, such as sibling rivalry, bullies, and first dates.

Best-selling author Gordon Korman's middle-grade favorite, now with a fresh look! Wallace Wallace won’t lie, even if it means detention. And after he handed in a scorching book report of the classic novel, Old Shep, My Pal, detention is just what he’s been handed. He is sure he’s done nothing wrong: he hated every minute of that book, especially when the dog dies in the end! Why do dogs always die at the end? Wallace refuses to do a rewrite of his report, so his English teacher, who happens to be directing the school play of Old Shep, My Pal, forces him go to the rehearsals to teach him a lesson on why the story is the way it is. Surrounded by theater kids who are apprehensive of him, Wallace sets out to prove himself. But not by changing his mind. Instead, he changes the play into a rock-and-roll rendition, complete with Rollerblades and a moped!

Kitty used to be Jennie Livingston’s valuable Chartreux cat. Thanks to celebrity shaman Carlos, she is now a beautiful young woman with a feisty personality, a French accent, and an obsession with Scarlett O’Hara as her human role model. Before long, Kitty is trying to break up Jennie’s budding romance with Hollywood screenwriter Casey Chandler and set her up with Carlos instead. When not playing matchmaker, Kitty amuses herself by harassing Casey’s English Sheepdog Shep, who used to chase her up trees in her previous life. But when Carlos transforms Shep into a handsome young British chap, Kitty decides she wants to play Juliet to Shep’s Romeo. Romance is put on hold when Mickey Souris, Jennie’s disgruntled ex, kidnaps Kitty to change her back into a cat and breed her for money. A rescue mission by Jennie, Carlos and Shep leads to a climactic battle and some surprising results.

“Coming of age” in children’s fiction often means achieving maturity through the experience of trauma. In classics ranging from Old Yeller to The Outsiders, a narrative of psychological pain defies expectations of childhood as a time of innocence and play. In this provocative new book, Eric L. Tribunella explores why trauma, especially the loss of a loved object, occurs in some of the most popular and critically acclaimed twentieth-century American fiction for children. Tribunella draws on queer theory and feminist revisions of Freud’s notion of melancholia, which is described as a fundamental response to loss, arguing that the low-grade symptoms of melancholia are in fact what characterize the mature, sober, and responsible American adult. Melancholia and Maturation looks at how this effect is achieved in a society that purports to protect youngsters from every possible source of danger, thus requiring melancholia to be induced artificially. Each of the book’s five chapters focuses on a different kind of lost object sacrificed so as to propel the child toward a distinctively gendered, sexual, ethical, and national adulthood—from same-sex friends to the companionship of boy-and-his-dog stories, from the lost ideals of historical fiction about the American Revolution to the children killed or traumatized in Holocaust novels. The author examines a wide spectrum of works—including Jack London’s dog tales, the contemporary “realistic” novels of S. E. Hinton, and Newbery Medal winners like Johnny Tremain and Bridge to Terabithia. Tribunella raises fundamental questions about the value of children’s literature as a whole and provides context for understanding why certain books become required reading for youth. Eric L. Tribunella is assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His articles have been published in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Children’s Literature in Education, The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature, and Children’s Literature.

" ... With an emphasis on non-fiction and the boy-friendly categories of genre fiction, this book offers a wealth of material including tips for how to booktalk one-on-one as well as in large groups, methods of performing indirect readers' advisory with parents or teachers, and suggested read-alikes as well as titles to offer a boy in place of a book he did not like or would not read ..."--Page 4 of cover.

Reid shows you how to share humor with children, in order to connect them to literature and imagination. The programs and the books he uses are kid-tested and ready for you to share.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why you were born to the parents you had? Why you are in the country you swear allegiance too. How tradition, culture, values, and life itself impact on you. What about sickness, suffering and deathdeath of children, not just one or two children in your own family, but the entire family but not you? When is it your turn to die as a child? Who is responsible for these deaths? What happens when you get to a point in your life one day when you must answer the question Who do you think you are? Does the answer to this question change at certain time lines in your life or does the answer remain the same? What impact does special force training, combat even protection of the state president of a country have on your response to these questions? What happens one day when you have an encounter with the living Godthe God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? This book is an honest answer to these and many more questions that the author found during his journey in writing this book.