Thirteen-year-old Spencer Dray, an intelligent, well-read, home-schooled boy already offered scholarships by prestigious colleges, is delighted when he and his parents move from their rented West Oakland, California bungalow into their very own home in the Oakland hills, a forested, storybook-like setting where deer, foxes and coyotes still roam, and with a pond to swim in; though it’s only a little stone cottage, former residence for the grounds-keeper of a huge estate. The lavish mansion upon the estate, once home to the Shade family, has been deserted since 1926, when Gilbert Grosvenor Shade, the last of the Shades, passed-away. As with most abandoned mansions, there are rumors it's haunted. There are also dark hints that the family line ended under sinister circumstances following the death by drowning of Gilbert’s fifteen-year-old son, Gavin, in the cottage’s pond, and Gilbert’s possible suicide shortly after due to grief. But, while Spencer’s first night in the cottage seems to be heralded by a haunting, it appears instead he’s found a new friend, a mischievous, somewhat scruffy boy named Dodger, who exhibits many traits of Charles Dickens’ Artful, as well as Huckleberry Finn. In company with Dodger, Spencer embarks upon nightly adventures, hopping freight trains, meeting more new friends in what some might call the wrong side of the tracks, and eventually discovers what really happened to the Shades.

Spencer's Spirit

Literature & Fiction

Mowry, Jess.

United States

Anubis

Way Past Cool was the first -- perhaps the only -- novel of urban American black life in the early 1990's: the era of collapsed structures, lost dreams, dashed hopes, agonizing violence, and a level of rage that for white America is simply unfathomable. But, have things gotten any better?Way Past Cool is the story of 13-year-old boys who live alone in abandoned buildings, of 16-year-old single mothers, and of lives that make kids old by the time they graduate from junior high... if they live that long.This novel stars Gordon, who at the age of 13, leads his gang through the deadly streets of West Oakland, California. He carries a gun, has seen more people die than a Vietnam platoon leader, and can out-swear a dozen sailors. Gordon is backed by Lyon, a fragile-looking soft-spoken boy whose forays into mysticism have given him a spirituality that belies that fact that he'll blow your head off if he has to. Gordon's gang, known as The Friends, live in a state of tense coexistence with The Crew. The tenuous peace of their neighborhood is broken by Deek, a drug dealer whose bodyguard, Ty, is trying to protect his own little brother from the street life. Deek is trying to sell guns to each gang in hope of escalating their turf rivalry into real war... for his benefit. On the sidelines sit the police. The ones who aren't actually on the take are happy to let the kids kill each other off.Throughout this story of despair, violence, and hopelessness, runs a thread of human feeling and power that prevails even over the horrific reality of the characters' lives. The connection between the members of the gang is one of mutual survival, and of kids trying to meet each other's emotional needs without "proper parental guidance" or decent societal role-models. These young boys are violent, vulgar, and perceived by most of mainstream society as a lost cause, yet there is something uniquely human about them... all children are born knowing how to love, but must be taught how to hate. In a way that many "kinder and gentler" people will never understand, they love each other, and in each other they find hope.

Way Past Cool

Voodoo Dawgz

Genre Fiction

Song For A Summer Night

Dennis, Mark

Action & Adventure

Drawing From Life

13-year-old Mike Saunders, African-American, and raised by his novel-writing dad in the nice suburban environment of Thousand Oaks, California, is dismayed when his father's uncertain income forces a move to a tumbledown shack in the desolate sweltering desert of Coyote Valley, Arizona. The property, such as it is -- electricity unreliable, and only a windmill for water -- was left to Mike's dad by Mike's great-uncle, who died at the age of 107 after spending most of his life searching for a ton of gold bars stolen in a train robbery in 1897 and reputedly still buried somewhere near the robbery site. Except for its rusty narrow-gauge track, the Coyote Valley And Codyville railroad, abandoned in 1917, has almost been forgotten, along with the ghost town of Codyville somewhere up in the mountains. But Mike, though a model-railroader having an interest in real steam trains, is more concerned upon his arrival to find that the only potential friends within twenty miles are Carson, 12, a smart-ass “gamer" and Little Coyote, 13, an enormously fat Apache boy who lives in a shack no better than Mike's at what had once been a water stop on the abandoned railroad. Mike isn't sure he wants to befriend either one. But, as the story unfolds, revealing desert legend and lore, crusty old wild west characters, an adventure in an abandoned mine, a steam locomotive resurrected, and an encounter with gun-toting ghosts, Mike learns that true friends come in all colors and sizes, and souls aren't judged by BMI, or how much wealth one accumulates while breathing the air of this earth.

Double Acting

Rats In The Trees is Jess Mowry's first book, written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Co. of Santa Barbara, California in 1990. It's a collection of interrelated stories about street kids, though most about Robby, a 13-year-old boy from Fresno, California who runs away from a foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone, he's befriended by a "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds who call themselves The Animals. Rats portrays the conditions for many inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of Ronald Regan's "trickle-down theory" and the beginning of George H.W. Bush's "kinder, gentler nation" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into mostly poor black neighborhoods as if designed to bring down the people and especially to destroy kids. Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats have come true; the ever-increasing dominance of guns drugs and violence, kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education. Rats In The Trees received a PEN Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature in 1990, and was published in the U.K., Germany and Japan. It was also reprinted by Viking in the U.S. This Anubis Edition includes an extra story and original text not available in previous editions.

Rats In The Trees

Thirteen-year-old Corbitt Wainwright's adolescence is abruptly cut short when his father is imprisoned for attacking a white man. Tragically, dreams of success through good grades and hard work are wiped aside as white society shows him, out of both kindness and malice, that poor black kids in Mississippi don't have much of a hand in creating their own destinies. Refusing to accept this allotted role, and after a deadly confrontation with his father's accuser, Corbitt sets out for California, the land of opportunity and supposed racial equality. But, upon his arrival in Oakland, a whole other world awaits; a world populated by gangs and crack dealers, violent cops and gun-toting kids, where the future seems even bleaker than it does back home. Against the odds, he helps some of the local homeboys overcome one of their many predators and discovers his own strength.

Six Out Seven

Saravá Oxóssi (Em Portuguese do Brasil)

Ademir Barbosa Júnior

Buzios a Linguagem dos Orixas

París

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