Frances O'Roark Dowell

Told in a series of reports to his therapist, Hazard is resentful about being forced into counseling after being suspended from his school football team for unsportsmanlike conduct, angry that his father has served four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, angry that his father has lost a leg when an IED blew up--but as his therapy progresses he begins to process what has happened to him and his family, including his father's psychological trauma...

Sixth grade is a MOST confusing time. Best friends aren't friends anymore. Worst enemies suddenly want to be partners in crime. And classmates you thought you knew have all sorts of surprising stuff going on. The kids in Mrs. Herrera's class are dealing with all these things and more--specifically, three more: 1. There's a new girl who just seems to be spying on them all and scribbling things in a notebook. Maybe she IS a spy? 2. Someone is stealing...

Marylin and Kate have been friends since nursery school, but when Marylin becomes a middle school cheerleader and Kate begins to develop other interests, their relationship is put to the test.

Twelve-year-olds Kate and Marylin, friends since preschool, draw further apart as Marylin becomes involved in student government and cheerleading, while Kate wants to play guitar and write songs, and both develop unlikely friendships with other girls and boys.

In a series of letters to her cousin, twelve-year-old Arie Mae relates her life in a mountain valley of North Carolina in the 1920s.

"An instructional book on how to write a story from bestselling author Frances O'Roark Dowell"--

[The author] combines her deep connection to the quilting life and her love of storytelling to create a novel about the abiding friendships that bind together a community of women who share a love of making quilts. When Emma Byrd moves to the house of her dreams in the small mountain community of Sweet Anne's Gap, North Carolina, she knows she'll have to do some work in order to connect to her neighbors. Her kids immediately make friends at school...

From the author of Birds in the Air, a touching, big-hearted collection of short stories about women whose lives revolve around family, friends and quilt-making. "This collection presents the cozy comfort of characters we quilters easily recognize and relate to, but goes far deeper," writes Marianne Fons. "I was moved to tears repeatedly. Dowell's five short narratives are about the joys and sorrows inherent in the human condition - but with quilts...

Since the death of his mother, Tobin's family life and school life have been in disarray, but after he starts raising chickens with his seventh-grade classmate, Henry, everything starts to fall into place.

"Sam the Man is not a vegetable man. But when a school project has him paired up with the worst of all the vegetables -- the rutabaga-- he soon will learn that it's not half bad. And as he grows fond of his new little friend, Sam the Man will have to come up with plan on how to keep him happy before he rots!"--