This article was originally written in three parts and published in The Wyoming News Chronicle in the spring of 2023. Andrew Carnegie, born in Scotland in 1835, emigrated with his parents to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when he was twelve years old. His life is an almost unbelievable rags-to-riches story. He went from working as a bobbin…
Author: Diane Pendergraft
Orbiting Jupiter
In nearly every review Sara and I have written for Gary D. Schmidt’s books, we have used the word hard to describe the situations his characters encounter. Orbiting Jupiter takes hard to a new level. In this interview with Schmidt after Okay for Now was published, he talks about an experience at a book club…
The Big Jump
In Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now, Doug finds himself babysitting the local police officer’s five children. Before they go to bed, he has to read a book to each of them. Since Doug has only just learned to read, though he is in the eighth grade, the children’s books most of us recognize aren’t…
Anson’s Way
Anson’s Way, published in 1999, is Gary D. Schmidt’s fourth book, but only his second fiction novel. The Sin Eater was his first. When the story opens, Anson Staplyton, drummer boy, is aboard ship on his way to Ireland from England where he will take his place as the seventh Staplyton to keep the king’s…
The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles
He loves his job because getting the letters so often makes people happy, but his wish is that someday a letter will be for him. This is unlikely because he has no friends. His loneliness is exemplified by the bleakness of the illustrations through about half the book.
Ain’t Nothing but a Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry
I remember singing some version of “The Ballad of John Henry” when I was in grade school, but I don’t remember anyone explaining what it meant. Since we learned it along with silly songs like “Froggy Went a-Courtin’” and “Señor Don Gato,” it didn’t occur to me to wonder if John Henry had been a…
The Sin Eater
“Time was like a fishing line that gets all caught in the reel, looping back into itself and tangling into knots that are forever. And the days’ stories were all knitted in tangles, so that I could hardly remember one day from another.” No one who has read Gary D. Schmidt’s novels or our previous…
Swirl by Swirl and Blockhead
One regular feature that Biblioguides posts on social media is called Bookalikes. Their team highlights two books that are related and complementary in some way. What interested me about the pairing of Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature by Joyce Sidman with Blockhead: the Life of Fibonacci by Joseph D’Agnese was that they looked like…
Okay for Now
“Doug Swieteck once made up a list of 410 ways to get a teacher to hate you. It began with ‘Spray deodorant in all her desk drawers’ and got worse as it went along. A whole lot worse. . . . They were the kinds of things that sent kids to juvenile detention homes in…
Pay Attention, Carter Jones
I’m sure I would never have picked up Gary D. Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars if Sara Masarik hadn’t asked me to read it. And normally, if I’m two thirds of the way through a book and still not into it, I’m not going to finish. But I said I would, so I did. And then…
Who Walks the Attic?
During a recent conversation, my husband said he remembered the first chapter book he ever read by himself. He didn’t remember the title perfectly, but with the help of Amazon, I found it! Who Walks the Attic by Laura Bannon. I asked him if it was worth $7 to read it again. He said it…
Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky
“Son, the times they was so hard, you couldn’t hardly crack them.” Grace Caudill Lucas What if you had never learned to read? Can you imagine going to a school where there were no books? What if the only books you had access to were those that libraries didn’t want anymore that, once discarded, had…
Waiting for the Biblioburro
On a hill behind a tree, there is a house. In the house, there is a bed and on the bed there is a little girl named Ana, fast asleep, dreaming about the world outside and beyond the hill. Ana has to help her father and mother with the farm work. When it’s hot outside,…
That Book Woman
I had already read That Book Woman once before reading it aloud to my class today. But I choked up on the last page again anyway. “‘Wish there was something I could gift you too.’ That Book Woman turns to look at me with big dark eyes. ‘Come here, Cal,’ she says real gentle, and…
Toward Morning: A Story of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters
Alta Halverson Seymour’s book, Toward Morning: A Story of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, is a fast-paced, small-slice story of a group of family and friends escaping Hungary in the midst of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The Kirkus Review of this book from March, 1961 says, the “heroic story will interest American teenagers who met…