From Tamar Myers, author of The Witch Doctor's Wife, comes a spellbinding tale of equatorial Africa and a child torn dangerously between two worlds. In 1945, an infant left inadvertently to die in the jungles of the Belgian Congo is discovered by a young Bashilele tribesman on a mission to claim the head of an enemy. Recognized as human--despite her pale white skin and strange blue eyes--the baby is brought into the tribe and raised as its own. Thirteen years later, the girl--now called "Ugly Eyes"--will find herself at the center of a controversy that will rock two separate societies.
Schnur's (Spring: An Alphabet Acrostic) soothingly lyrical verses describe a girl's bedtime counting ritual. Beginning with the conch-shaped nightlight she sees in her room ("one seashell on the nursery wall,/ two amber blinking clocks"), the child observes the sources of light as she progresses through the house, then her neighborhood ("thirteen streetlamps light the park"), the city ("fourteen stoplights blink,/ fifteen towers scrape the sky") and the world beyond.
Over an extraordinary twenty-year career, Jane Smiley has written all kinds of novels: mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. “Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?” raves Time magazine. But in the wake of 9/11, Smiley faltered in her hitherto unflagging impulse to write and decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read one hundred of them, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, and Alice Munro.
Providing a brief history of one of the first U.S. colonies, New Hampshire covers details of daily colonial life and the growing political workings of America as well as the effects of revolution, reform, and restoration in England on the colony.
New Jersey provides intriguing descriptions of life in the early colony, including such details as the division of New Jersey into East and West; the effect of the presence of the Society of Friends; the success of farming, which contributed to the state's nickname, "The Garden State"; and the history of slavery in the colony.
