Heads or Tails: Stories from the Sixth Grade

This humorous and heartwarming novel takes place during the summer of 1962, when narrator Jack Gantos turns 12 and has been “grounded for life” by his parents. He takes on a summer job writing obituaries filled with stories about the people who founded his Utopian town, Norvelt. Gantos expertly mixes truth and fiction in this book, which won the Newbery award in 2012. For mature readers 9-12 and teens.

When sixteen-year-old Walker gets caught up in a witch-hunt against homosexuals, he is left to stand by and watch as a tragedy unfolds.

This rocket-paced follow-up to the Newbery Medal-winning novel Dead End in Norvelt opens deep in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis. But instead of Russian warheads, other kinds of trouble are raining down on young Jack Gantos and his utopian town of Norvelt in western Pennsylvania. After an explosion, a new crime by an old murderer, and the sad passing of the town’s founder, twelve-year-old Jack will soon find himself launched on a mission that takes him hundreds of miles away to places including Hyde Park, NY, escorting his slightly mental elderly mentor, Miss Volker, on her relentless pursuit of the oddest of outlaws and her determination to pay her respects to Eleanor Roosevelt.

The emotional honesty of Gantos’ fiction for tweens and teens is evident in this nonfiction memoir for older, more sophisticated readers. Here, he shares his low self-esteem as a young person who gets caught up in dealing drugs. This book makes for tough but powerful reading — especially since Gantos is now on the other side of those early, difficult years.

Joey’s dad is back in the picture after winning the lottery. He’s a man with a mission—to remake himself and his family. But, Joey wonders as his mother takes his father back into their life, is it really possible? Readers will cheer Joey on as his journey ranges from the heartbreaking to the comical.

Jack and his family are moving to North Carolina now that his father has joined the navy. In school there, nine-year-old Jack falls hopelessly in love with his new teacher. Told through Jack’s crisp, often funny, sometimes poignant narration in a format that emulates a journal, this is the prequel for the Jack series.

Inspired by the author’s childhood diaries, this collection of Jack Henry stories depicts a fifth-grade year to end all fifth-grade years. Living in a Miami rental home with a busy railroad track running a stone’s throw from the backyard, Jack is plagued by a know-it-all older sister, a bizarre Francophile teacher, a series of crazed cats, a slightly off-kilter father, a tapeworm, and a pair of escaped convicts — to name just a few of his antagonists.

According to his new motto, “A Writer’s Job Is to Turn His Worst Experiences Into Money,” Jack Henry is going to be filthy rich even before he gets out of junior high, for his life is filled with the worst experiences imaginable. In the course of the few months Jack is humiliated by a gorgeous synchronized swimmer, gets a tattoo the size of an ant on his big toe, flubs an IQ test and nearly fails wood shop, and has to dig up his dead dog not once but twice. And that’s not the half of it.

It is the summer after sixth grade and Jack and his offbeat family have relocated to Barbados. But even in a tropical paradise, Jack is plagued by misadventure.

Joey Pigza really wants his six-week visit with his dad to count, to show him he’s not as wired as he used to be, to show his dad how much he loves him. But Carter Pigza’s not an easy guy to love. He’s eager to make it up to Joey for past wrongs and to show him how to be a winner, to take control of his life. With his coaching, Joey’s even learned how to pitch a baseball, and he’s good at it. The trouble is, Joey’s dad thinks taking control means giving up the things that “keep Joey safe”. And if he wants to please his dad, he’s going to have to play by his rules, even when the rules don’t make sense.

Joey is out of control. He knows it, his mom knows it, and the school knows it. Nothing seems to remedy his behavior until Joey runs away from a class field trip, hurts a classmate, and is sent to a special education program. There, his medications are regulated and Joey achieves a level of control.

The discovery of a chilling secret reveals a disturbing side to the eccentric lives of family friends Abner and Adolph Rumbaugh, known throughout their small western Pennsylvania town simply as the Twins. Immediately, Ivy’s discovery provokes the revelation of a Rumbaugh family curse, a curse that, as Ivy will learn over the coming years, holds a strange power over herself and her own mother.