Ride a Shadowed Trail
Joshua Ryder is eight-years-old and living with his Mexican mother in the seaport town of Indianola, Texas when she is murdered. Pete Waters an old ex-cowboy teaches him the cowboy trade,and gives him a colt he calls Shadow to raise as his own. The boy longs to know something of his white father, his "pa" as he likes to think of him, but eleven years will pass before he learns the truth. Eleven years in which his cowboy skills are tested, his heart opens to young love, he again knows sorrow, and finally meets the outlaw, Cole Slade, his mother's killer.
"This reader thoroughly enjoyed this story line." Sandy Whiting in a review for The Western Writers of America's Roundup magazine.
Trapped! the True Story of a Pioneer Girl
The George and Jacob Donner families and the James Reed family left Springfield, Illinois bound for California, on a sunny April day in 1846. Halfway through their journey, they trusted men looking for their own personal gain,and lost everything. James Reed was cast from the wagon train, forced to leave his wife and children and go on alone. Because the terrain was so much worse than they were led to believe, the rest of caravan, arrived so late in the fall that the mountains of the high Sierras were already so deep with snow that to travel farther was impossible.
Starvation stalked those ill-fated pioneers and many died that winter. Would twelve-year-old Virginia Reed, her three younger siblings, and their mother manage to hold on until spring? The story of a true event for middle-grade readers, Trapped! is a Kansas Reading Circle Selection,also reprinted in China.
The Summer of the Crow
The Summer of the Crow is a story of growing up during the Depression. The setting is rural Kansas during those “Dust Bowl”days, when neighbors bid low to save a farm from foreclosure, rabbit drives were combined necessity and social outing, and dust pneumonia and polio, hunger and homelessness were very real threats. Brady, thirteen,and his little sister, who is autistic, spend the summer of 1935 with their grandfather, a county sheriff, while their parents travel to California for the mother's health. Brady is bullied and teased about his odd-acting little sister and befriended by Eddie, the son of the "town drunk", a boy with a pet crow.
The Summer of the Crow was a Kansas Reading Circle selection and won the J. Donald Coffin award given at the annual Kansas Authors Convention for the best work of fiction.
A Window to the World
A twig snapped underfoot and the shadowy form of an owl flew past on silent wings. Close by, so close it raised the hair on my scalp, something barked. I whipped around, visions of slave-hunting dogs leaping at us from the brush. “What was that!”
“A fox, Miss.”
“Oh.” I knew the bark of a fox. I’d heard it before. Just not on a dark night when I was running through the woods with a fugitive slave.
Annie Duncan’s pa disappears on his way to the California gold fields and is presumed dead. A widower begins courting Ma. Annie and her brothers find little to like about the man, why he even believes in slavery. When a runaway slave comes to the Duncan farm, the family conspires to hide him, not just from the slave catchers, but also from Ma’s soon-to-be husband.
A mysterious one-armed man and Annie's rebellion on her birthday bring happy changes to the Duncan family.
Maggie Rose and Sass
When Maggie Rose, a white girl, comes to Kansas to live with her uncle's family, she never dreams the town, settled by ex-slaves from Kentucky, is almost all black. Sass, born in Solomon Town, soon meets the white girl and right away their differences drive a wedge between them. The setting is based on Nicodemus, an all black town in Kansas.
Insightfully written…historically moving…
Angela Bates, Nicodemus Descendant, Historian and Author: Recipient of the 2005 Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award
A memorable addition to Kansas young adult fiction. Solidly based on historical fact, yet illustrates some perpetual truths. It is a celebration of both the pioneer spirit and of diversity. Readers will not soon forget this book.
Roy Bird, Kansas State Library Consultant, Author of In His Brother’s Shadow and Civil War in Kansas
Maggie Rose and Sass is a 2006 Kansas Notable book. It was also chosen by Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to send to a school in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The school contacted the state governors and asked for a middle grade/Young Adult book to help replenish their library lost to the storm.
