Shreve, Susan Richards

Joshua's teacher Miss Goodwin is probably the world's most surprising teacher. Who would have believed how easy it was to learn to read or how hard it was to leave her.

Fourth-grader Lotty has problems with her family and her friends at school.

Eleven-year-old Peter and his three younger siblings rediscover their lost closeness when the ghosts of their dead pet cats begin to return mysteriously.

Until Joshua met Miss Goodwin, he thought he might never learn to read well enough to get out of the third grade.

The members of a young neighborhood "gang" become involved in real danger when they begin spying on the house of beautiful and mysterious Tess.

Eight-year-old Sammy tries to come to terms with several dificult situations including the death of his dog, the divorce of his aunt and uncle, the suicide of his best friend's brother, coping with his terminally ill grandmother, and cheating on a school test.

Driving home from the beach on Labor Day, Joshua receives some shocking news from his mother: he must repeat third grade.

Just after her eleventh birthday in 1950 and at the height of the frightening childhood polio epidemic, Susan Richards Shreve was sent to the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia. It was a place famously founded by FDR, "a perfect setting in time and place and strangeness for a hospital of crippled children." There the young Shreve meets Joey Buckley, paralyzed from the waist down and determined to leave Warm Springs able to play football. The dual shocks of first love and separation from her fiercely protective mother propel Shreve careening between bad girl rebellion to overachieving saint. This portrait of the psychic fallout of childhood illness ends with a shocking collision between adolescent drive and genteel institution. During Shreve's stay at Warm Springs, the Salk vaccine was discovered; Shreve is one of the last generation of Americans to have survived childhood polio.--From publisher description.

Third-grader Lily, a middle child who feels neglected at home, decides to run away and take her infant sister with her.