Schumacher, Julie

Jason Fitger may be the last faculty member the dean wants for the job, but he's the only professor available to chaperone Payne University's annual "Experience: Abroad" (he has long been on the record objecting to the absurd and gratuitous colon between the words) occurring during the three weeks of winter term. Among his charges are a claustrophobe with a juvenile detention record, a student who erroneously believes he is headed for the Caribbean, a pair of unreconciled lovers, a set of undifferentiated twins, and one young woman who has never been away from her cat before.

While visiting her grandparents in Port Harbor, New Jersey, thirteen-year-old Theodora lists one hundred truths that she discovers while baby-sitting her younger cousins.

"Now is the fall of his discontent, as Jason Fitger, newly appointed chair of the English Department of Payne University, takes arms against a sea of troubles, personal and institutional. His ex-wife is sleeping with the dean who must approve whatever modest initiatives he undertakes. The fearsome department secretary Fran clearly runs the show (when not taking in rescue parrots and dogs) and holds plenty of secrets she's not sharing. The lavishly funded Econ Department keeps siphoning off English's meager resources and has taken aim at its remaining office space. And Fitger's attempt to get a mossbacked and antediluvian Shakespeare scholar to retire backfires spectacularly when the press concludes that the Bard is being kicked to the curricular curb"--Amazon.com.

Collection of short stories exploring family dynamics.

When four very different small-town high school girls are forced to join a mother-daughter book club over summer vacation, they end up learning about more than just the books they read.

Jane Haus, unmarried and pregnant, moves in with her emotionally distant father and spends her time trying to make sense of her life.

Rather than go to a spiritual retreat in Oregon with her mother and brother, eleven-year-old Frances insists on staying in Ohio with her odd aunt, but she soon begins to worry that the retreat may really be a cult.

When her sixteen-year-old sister is hospitalized for depression and her parents want to keep it a secret, fourteen-year-old Elena tries to cope with her own anxiety and feelings of guilt that she is determined to conceal from outsiders.

When sixth-grader Livvie decides to throw a chain letter in the trash, bad luck ensues.

Sixth-grader Livvie isn't superstitious, but when she throws a chain letter in the trash, against her friend Joyce's advice, a streak of bad luck ensues.