The Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars, 1971

You're a 14-year old girl and you're the tallest in your class and with the biggest feet. This summer is the same as all the other summers except that everything makes you cry. Why? You don't know. Perhaps it's because you thought orange sneakers were cool and you realize they only highlight your feet. Besides, your sister is much prettier than you, you live with your aunt because your mother is dead while your father has gone off to raise his own family. Nothing is going right. On top of all that, you've got a 10-year-old brother who hasn't talked since he was three, has no friends and is wholly dependent on you. You can't just go off with your friends like the other people do. And you have to take him everywhere. Then one day your brother disappears. If he can get hopelessly lost three blocks away, where could he have gone to in the middle of the night? Wouldn't you just drop everything and rush off to find him? This is an excellent, non-mushy story about the love of a sister for her mentally-handicapped brother. Sibling relationships are hard enough, what more when you can't communicate with one another? Also, the description of Charlie is handled with sensitivity. Through his eyes we see how the world is a big, scary place except when he is with his family, when watching the swans or when listening to his watch.

A Gathering of Days ( A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32) by Joan W. Blos, 1979

Quietly beautiful and poignant, this book guides the reader through the everyday life of a young girl in the late 1800s. The strength of the narrator, Catherine Hall, lies not in anything remarkable about her, but in her normalcy. She writes as a daughter, an older sister, a classmate, a bestfriend, a young girl prone to mistakes and a bit of foolishness - but not overly so. Indeed, the charm of this tale lies in that it may have been the life of any girl at the time who helped at home by hemming, mending quilts, tending to the potatoes and parsnips, cooking, haying and cleaning. She also had her fun skating with her friends, gossiping and playing outdoors, appreciating each season for whatever blessings it can give her. My favorite passages are what she tells about autumn in New England.

A Study Guide

Oh, I do think, as has been said, that if getting in the corn and potatoes are the prose of a farm child's life, then nutting's the poetry. Chestnuts and beechnuts are plentiful now, and some hickories. Also, happily in good supply are those which are my special delight, the rich, round butternuts. The woods these days are glorious and gold, but there still hover over the meadow grasses small bright butterflies. Could these sweet hours but stay & stay, cruel Winter never come nigh! And as in every life, when there is spring, summer and autumn, there is always winter. Catherine as a young girl lost her mother, and years later lost her bestfriend Cassie to sickness as well. The story was set in the time when slavery in the United States of America was legal yet debate was brewing as to whether it was moral. Catherine's mixture of kindness, generosity and foolhardiness may have helped a man escape to his freedom.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, 1963

Setting: The Murry residence near a forest, somewhere in small town, USA. Also, different worlds like Uriel, populated with creatures like winged centaurs; Camazotz, a Dark Planet, held by an evil IT; Ixchel, an opaque populated by gentle creatures with no eyes and tentacles for ears and hair; a two-dimensional planet. Time period: No particular time period, especially since most of the action is in Kairos (an added section in the book explains: real time, pure numbers with no measurement). This is in contrast to Chronos (ordinary, wrist-watch, alarm-clock time, explained in the same section). The length of the journey could have been centuries or five minutes, as they were travelling in a wrinkle time as well as a wrinkle in space. Main character(s): Margaret "Meg" Murry, an awkward teenager, story told from her POV. Charles Wallace Murry, Meg's five-year-old brother. Calvin O' Keefe, a popular boy from Meg's school. Guardian angels? Witches? Higher beings?: Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit. IT: Evil incarnate. Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal.

The plot: For Meg Murry, life sucks: her grades are dangerously low, her hair unmanageable and her temper mercurial. All this because her father is away, hasn't written for a year and the town grapevine says he has gone off with another woman. Why can't Meg handle all this as gracefully as her beautiful, scientist-mother does? Meanwhile, Charles Wallace, Meg's brother, has taken to talking with strangers living in a haunted house in the forest. These strangers (and they are very strange indeed), know where their father is and that he is in danger. It is up to Meg, Charles, and Calvin, a boy they meet near the haunted house, to rescue Dr. Murry. An evil force holds Dr. Murry captive in Camazotz, a planet far, far away. The strange ones, Mrs Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit tesser (pass through a wrinkle in time) the children into Camazotz and give them gifts to help them take Dr. Murry away from IT, the big brain that controls all activity in the planet. And when I say "brain," I do not mean the plotter of a scheme or the smart person behind a crime. I do mean BRAIN. In all its convoluted, gray-matter glory. The rescue operation is botched and it is up to Meg, with all her faults and fears and insecurities to make everything right.

A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck, 1999

Setting: Somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis, Illinois, USA - "in one of the towns the [Wabash] railroad tracks cut in two." Time period: 1920s-1930s. "Prohibition was on in those days, which meant that selling liquor was against the law." Main character(s): Grandma Dowdel. Joey Dowdel, from age 9, narrator. Mary Alice Dowdel, from age 7, Joey's sister. The 1999 Newbery Honor book. A 1998 National Book Award finalist. An ALA Notable book.

The plot: Joey tells stories of their annual one-week visits to Grandma Dowdel. She's not the wizened grandmother stooped low and smelling of peppermints. She's the kind that takes Joey and Mary Alice catfishing in a stolen rowboat early in the morning, strangling a snake and catching the town's respectable businessmen in their droopy underwear while at it. She boils her own soap, brews her own beer, and packs a twelve gauge double-barreled Winchester Model 21. She also bakes the best gooseberry pie in the county. She can also lie like a sidewalk. The first two years, Joey and Mary Alice are reluctant to spend a week in the country with their Grandma, not when Chicago is more exciting with its talkies and Al Capone. But they slowly understand the way her mind works and start looking forward to their summers. My favorite quote: "Let's get on the road. Douse the fire and hide the ax and skillet."