The Ballad of Lucy Whipple

So often when we think of the Gold Rush of California, what comes to mind is a crusty old Yosemite Sam type of character. In The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, Newbery Award winning author Karen Cushman gives us a different perspective. In this realistic, poignant, but often funny historical fiction novel-a young California Morning Whipple is dragged by her widowed mother away from her beloved Massachusetts to help set up a boarding house in Lucky Diggins, California. She absolutely detests the rough and tumble town and changes her name from California Morning to a more refined Lucy. This story is told in the first person (and sometimes in letters) and has a lot of interesting details about what life might have been like for women and children during the Gold Rush times.
Barbara-Elementary School Reading Teacher.

Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus

Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus is a sweet story of two caterpillars that grow into butterflies. Yellow and Stripe are two caterpillars who meet while trying to find out the meaning of life. They decide to break away from the pack of caterpillars and fall in love. Then one day Yellow discovers a butterfly and learns about what her fate may be. Stripe’s destiny leads him on another path. Yellow builds a cocoon and finally hatches. Stripe is heartbroken that he cannot find yellow but continues on his own journey. Stripe and Yellow cross paths again and it is clear what he needs to do. The illustrations are all delicately hand drawn. Hope for the Flowers is lovely story for any reader who loves a happy ending!

Lauren R elementary school teacher

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
For Americans, this novel is the antithesis story of "the other." John Grady and Rawlins embark on a journey of passage from Texas to Mexico in the late 1940s. Insteac of going north, the protagonists go south in search of their "home." As late teens, they are on a quest...and they find a world beyond anything they could have imagined. One of McCarthy's most accessible novels, Horses examines an America trying to come to terms with itself after World War II. The frontier is dead; all land is fenced in. The horses may be "pretty," but they are not wild any longer. The movie "All the Pretty Horses," directed by Billy Bob Thornton, is a wonderful resource for students to explore issues of interpretation of literary works in more than one medium. For high school/college classrooms. By Natosi, high school/college English instructor.