New Releases by Donna Jo Napoli

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.

Ten-year-old Eileen''s life changes drastically when her father separates from her mother and moves out, taking with him the piano on which she is used to practicing every day.

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.

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

When ten-year-old Adam discovers that his freckles can see and talk, he plans to use this secret to get onto the school soccer team.

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.