New Releases by Donna Jo Napoli

In this charming blend of storytelling and math, four siblings use their fraction skills to get their dearest wish. Full color.

In 1892, nine-year-old Dom’s mother puts him on a ship leaving Italy, bound for America. He is a stowaway, traveling alone and with nothing of value except for a new pair of shoes from his mother. In the turbulent world of homeless children in Manhattan’s Five Points, Dom learns street smarts, and not only survives, but thrives by starting his own business. A vivid, fascinating story of an exceptional boy, based in part on the author’s grandfather.

Tired of his mother''s overprotectiveness and intrigued by the life of African American explorer Matthew Henson, twelve-year-old Alvin travels north and spends a season with a trapper near the Arctic Circle.

There are some strange new pets in Sly''s neighborhood: a cat on a diet that keeps getting fatter, a fish that seems angry at its owner, and a peculiar pet named Wilson that suddenly disappears! Only Sly the Sleuth can solve these mysteries. Grade-schooler by day, private detective by afternoon, Sly (a.k.a Sylvia) uses her sharp wits and reasoning skills to get to the bottom of these odd goings-on. Donna Jo Napoli teams up with her son, Robert Furrow, and illustrator Heather Maione to create a heroine who is not only smart and spunky, but also tremendously funny.

One day when Albert is at his window, two cardinals come to build a nest in his hand, an event that changes his life.

When the manager''s great-aunt decides to take everyone at Hotel Jungle on a week-long cruise, a troop of local baboons explores the empty hotel with surprising results for a newly-arrived family on vacation.

In 1592, Donata is a noble girl living in a palazzo on the Grand Canal. Girls of her class receive no education and rarely leave the palazzo. In a noble family, only one daughter and one son will be allowed to marry; Donata, like all younger daughters, will be sent to a convent. Donata longs to be tutored like her brothers and to see the Venice she has glimpsed only on the map. What is the world beyond her balcony, beyond what she sees when she glides, veiled, in a gondola down the canal? She dresses as a boy and escapes the palazzo on the Grand Canal to see the world before she is shut away, and to try to find a way to escape her fate. Donata risks everything; she changes her life, and her family’s life, forever when she walks through the door and encounters a Venice she never knew existed.

While driving in the Italian countryside, eleven-year-old Jackie''s father suddenly collapses at the wheel. Fear for her father''s life quickly turns to terror when two Italian men kidnap her and drive to their remote home in the countryside. Jackie soon discovers that her captors are actually a family, plagued by a mysterious secret. Award-winning novelist Donna Jo Napoli has created a haunting thriller that gives life to Jackie''s utter desperation and determination to escape.

When her pet rabbit''s newborn babies die, her doctor tells her that she may have scoliosis, and her aunt is diagnosed with cancer, ten-year-old Laurel feels constantly reminded of the mortality of all living things.

When Roberto sneaks off to see a movie in his Italian village, he has no idea that life as he knows it is over. German soldiers raid the theater, round up the boys in the audience, and pack them onto a train. After a terrifying journey, Roberto and his best friend Samuele find themselves in a brutal work camp, where food is scarce and horror is everywhere. The boys vow to stay together no matter what. But Samuele has a dangerous secret, which, if discovered, could get them both killed. Lovers of historical fiction will be captivated by this tragic, triumphant, and deeply moving novel.

He has just moved into a new house with two bratty kids and five - FIVE! - mean cats. The kids are loud and scary. The cats gang up on him, eating his food and ruining his favourite things. Rocky feels lonely and sad. But one day, the kids start doing something they know they shouldn''t. When the teasing goes just a little too far, Rocky saves the day . . . and wins some grateful feline friends. Now Rocky is an honorary cat - a cat who says "Arf!" Award-winning children''s writer Donna Jo Napoli teams up with her sister Marie Kane and illustrator Tamara Petrosino to create this spunky, endearing pup whose heart is as big as his bark.

The Little Angel of Happiness tries to help Raquel get in the proper spirit for the winter holidays.

In this retelling of "Beauty and the Beast", a young, privileged Persian prince falters and makes a single wrong decision, setting an ancient curse into motion. He is transformed into a lion on the very day his father, the king, embarks on a lion hunt. Fleeing Persia, he makes his way across Europe in search of forgiveness and redemption, and finds it in a French beauty named Belle.

The Little Angel of Independence helps a girl named Elena develop independence and self-reliance when she loses her beloved toy giraffe during a visit to the park.

An original and beautifully wrought novel in the genre of "Zel" and "The Magic Circle." Napoli elaborates on the events recounted in the fairy tale, "Rumpelstiltskin, " in which a strange little man helps a miller''s daughter spin straw into gold for the king on the condition that she will give him her first-born child.

High in the mountains, Zel lives with her mother, who insists they have all they need because they have each other. Zel''s life is peaceful and protected--until she encounters a beautiful young prince at the market. But her mother sees the future unfolding and she will do the unspeakable to prevent Zel from leaving her. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This introduction to linguistic methodology and theory acquaints students with the analytical study of language and the ways in which linguists think and approach their material. Reader-friendly and highly accessible, the book assumes no previous background in linguistics. Linguistics is unique among texts today in that it brings the reader face-to-face with current cutting-edge theories. It covers in depth the five core areas of theoretical linguistics - phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics - and adds brief discussions of conversation interaction and historical/comparative linguistics where appropriate. Throughout the book, readers are asked to consider various hypotheses and to use them to account for a range of data. Accordingly, problem sets are included at the end of each chapter. While the data in these problems are drawn from multiple languages, all chapters contain problem sets on at least English, a Romance language, Japanese, and American Sign Language.

If she keeps far enough away from humans, perhaps she won’t be forced to hurt them. Deep in the woods lives the old witch called Ugly One. All she wants is to forget—the she was once a loving mother and a healer, blessed and powerful within her magic circle, and not a witch, claimed by the devils. Then one day she hears the footsteps she dreads. Then real voices—children’s voices. The Ugly One longs to take care of sturdy, sensible Gretel and her young brother Hansel. They are such good children, such delicious, beautiful children. But demons’ voices scream in her head: “Eat them!” How can she? . . . How can she not? “A brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed novel.”—School Library Journal, starred review “A work of great strength and powerful emotion, written with immediacy and intensity, filled with beauty and terror and pervading sense of compassion that must touch young and old.”—Lloyd Alexander An ALA Best Book for Young Adults A Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

Jimmy, the froglet son of an enchanted frog-prince, tries to save his pond from the evil hag and in the process finds himself transformed into a human boy.

Who is that handsome green stranger? None of the pond dwellers has ever seen the peculiar new frog before. They found him sitting in a pile of human clothes outside the hag’s house. What a strange frog he is! He gets his feet tangled when he tries to jump, he refuses to eat bugs, and he can’t tell a toad from a frog. He calls himself “De Fawg Pin,” and he’s about to turn pond life topsy-turvy! “The frog prince motif has inspired many books, but few as original as this novel.”—Booklist “An animal fantasy that fairy tale readers will relish.”—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, starred review

In this study Donna Jo Napoli takes a common-sense approach to the notions of argument and predicate. Discussions of predication within Government and Binding theory have stressed the configurational properties of the phrases involved, and Napoli argues that this has led to proposals for more and more elaborate syntactic structures that nevertheless fail to provide genuinely explanatory accounts. She presents a convincing case for viewing the notion of predicate as a semantic primitive which cannot be defined by looking simply at the lexicon or simply at the syntactic structure, and offers a theory or predication where the key to the subject-predicate relationship is theta-role assignment. The book then goes on to offer principles for the coindexing of a predicate with its subject role player. These coindexing principles make use of Chomsky''s 1986 notion of barriers, but instead of being sensitive to configurational notions like c-command and governing category, Napoli argues that they are sensitive to thematic structure. In the final chapter of the book Napoli extends the principles for predication coindexing to anaphor binding, by introducing the notion of argument ladders.