Jane Smiley
Author
Series
Description
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn first-born; Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land; Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know; Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different; and Claire, who...
Author
Series
Description
"Early Warning opens in 1953 with the Langdons at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch Walter, who with his wife had sustained their Iowa farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children looking to the future. Only one will remain to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, DC, California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves out of postwar optimism through the Cold War, the social and sexual revolutions...
Author
Description
In post-Civil War Missouri, quiet twenty-seven-year-old Margaret Mayfield marries the brilliant and eccentric scientist, Captain Andrew Early. The couple eventually make their way by train to their new life at Andrew's naval base in California, where their marriage grows troubled as Margaret gradually comes to realize she has married a madman.
5) Golden Age
Author
Series
Last hundred years trilogy volume 3
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
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
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
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 9
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.
Author
Formats
Description
Set in the fourteenth century in Europe's most farflung outpost, a land of glittering fjords, blasting winds, sun-warmed meadows, and high, dark mountains, The Greenlanders is the story of one family-proud landowner Asgeir Gunnarsson; his daughter Margret, whose willful independence leads her into passionate adultery and exile; and his son Gunnar, whose quest for knowledge is at the compelling center of this unforgettable book. Jane Smiley takes us...
10) Good Faith
Author
Formats
Description
Emerging from an ugly divorce in the early 1980s, real estate salesman Joe Stratford is reluctant to join his friend Marcus in a get-rich-quick scheme and wonders about the advances of a free-spirited married woman.
11) Pie in the sky
Author
Series
Horses of Oak Valley Ranch volume 4
Pub. Date
2012
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 10
Formats
Description
Abby Lovitt doesn't realize how unprepared she is when she takes her beloved horse, True Blue, to a clinic led by the most famous equestrian anyone knows. The biggest surprise, though, is that Sophia, the girl who never makes a mistake, suddenly makes so many that she stops riding. Who will ride her horse? Abby's dad seems to think it will be Abby. Pie in the Sky is the most expensive horse Abby has ever ridden. But he is proud and irritable, and...
12) Twenty Yawns
Author
Pub. Date
[2016]
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 2.7 - AR Pts: 1
Formats
Description
Going to bed early after spending a busy day at the beach with her family, Lucy wakes up in the middle of the night to find that her imagination leads her to see things differently in the dark.
13) Horse heaven
Author
Description
"Haunting, exquisite Rosalind Maybrick, wife of a billionaire owner, one day can't quite decide what it is she wants, and discovers too late that her whole life is transformed . . . Twenty-year-old Tiffany Morse, stuck in her job at Wal-Mart, prays, "Please make something happen here . . . This time, I mean it," and something does . . ." "Farley, a good trainer in a bad slump; Buddy, a ruthless trainer who can't seem to lose even though he knows that...
Author
Series
Horses of Oak Valley Ranch volume 4
Pub. Date
2012
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 10
Description
Abby Lovitt doesn't realize how unprepared she is when she takes her beloved horse, True Blue, to a clinic led by the most famous equestrian anyone knows. The biggest surprise, though, is that Sophia, the girl who never makes a mistake, suddenly makes so many that she stops riding. Who will ride her horse? Abby's dad seems to think it will be Abby. Pie in the Sky is the most expensive horse Abby has ever ridden. But he is proud and irritable, and...
Author
Formats
Description
Plain, independent Lidie Harkness, impatient with the restrictions placed on women in mid-nineteenth century Illinois, jumps at the chance to marry New England abolitionist Thomas Newton and travel with him to the Kansas Territory where they embark on a dangerous quest to stop the spread of slavery.
17) Moo
Author
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.
18) True Blue
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2011]
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.1 - AR Pts: 11
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.
19) A good horse
Author
Series
Pub. Date
©2010
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 10
Description
When eighth grader Abby Lovitt looks out at those pure-gold rolling hills, she knows theres no place shed rather be than her familys ranch-even with all the hard work of tending to nine horses. When he and Abby clear four feet easy as pie, heads start to turn at the ring-buyers heads-and Abby knows Daddy wont turn down a good offer.
20) Lucky
Author
Formats
Description
"Before Jodie Rattler became a star, she was a girl growing up in St. Louis. One day in 1955, when she was just six years old, her Uncle Drew took her to the racetrack, where she got lucky - and that roll of two-dollar bills she won has never since left her side. Jodie thrived in the warmth of her extended family, and then - through a combination of hard work and serendipity - started a singing career, which catapulted her from St. Louis to New York...