Jane Smiley
Author
Language
English
Description
"From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls. Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have:...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
In 1953, the Langdon family at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch, Walter, who with his wife, Rosanna, sustained their farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children, now adults, looking to the future. Only one will remain in Iowa to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, D.C., California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves out of post-World War II optimism through the darker landscape of the...
Author
Language
English
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres and the New York Times best-selling Last Hundred Years Trilogy, a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals--and a young boy--whose lives intersect in Paris Paras is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. At dusk, one afternoon she pushes open the door of her stall--she's a curious filly--and, after traveling through the night, arrives by chance...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...
Author
Series
Horses of Oak Valley Ranch volume 1
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2009
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 9
Language
English
Formats
Description
Seventh-grader Abby Lovitt grows up on her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, learning to train the horses her father sells and trying to reconcile her strict religious upbringing with her own ideas about life.
11) Twenty yawns
Author
Publisher
Two Lions
Pub. Date
[2016]
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 2.7 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Description
As her mom reads a bedtime story, Lucy drifts off. But later, she awakens in a dark, still room, and everything looks mysterious. How will she ever get back to sleep?
Author
Series
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
Ellen shares a secret with Ned, the colt who hurt his leg on his way to becoming a racehorse, but she also realizes that her parents are keeping a secret from her that may take her away from her riding and the horses she loves.
14) A good horse
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 10
Language
English
Formats
Description
On her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, eighth-grader Abby Lovitt faces the possibility of giving up her beloved colt, Jack, when it comes to light that his dam might have been stolen.
15) Moo
Author
Publisher
A.A. Knopf
Pub. Date
1995
Language
English
Description
A satire on university life, describing the rackets and the intellectual dishonesty that goes on. The setting is the U of Moo where research into the destruction of rain forests is tailored to suit the corporation funding the project. By the author of A Thousand Acres.
17) True blue
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2011
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.1 - AR Pts: 11
Language
English
Description
In 1960s California, eighth-grader Abby Lovitt has trouble with True Blue, the newest horse on her family's ranch, a beautiful dappled gray who is so often spooked, Abby wonders if he is haunted by the ghost of his deceased former owner.
Author
Publisher
Doubleday
Pub. Date
©2010
Language
English
Description
One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois-Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that the binary number system and electronic switches, combined with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would make his life easier. Then he went back and...
Author
Publisher
Heyday
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
"Essays that show how Smiley draws inspiration from across literary history to invigorate her own writing. Among the authors she examines are Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldor Laxness, and Jessica Mitford"--