New Releases by Rebecca Caudill

Twenty short stories selected for their literary quality and their spiritual integrity.

A Newbery Honor Book: During the Revolutionary War, a courageous pioneer girl fights for freedom When thirteen-year-old Stephanie Venable moves with her family from North Carolina to a four-hundred-acre homestead in Kentucky, she knows they’re in for a great adventure. The family sells whatever belongings they can’t fit in their covered wagon, and begin the long journey west. But Stephanie has brought something special with her, an apple seed from their tree back home, just as her grandmother did when she moved from France to America. In Kentucky, the Venables must fell trees, build a cabin, and prepare the land for crops. Being a pioneer is a lot of work, but it’s also very exciting: Stephanie and her family must grow, catch, or hunt everything they need to eat and survive. With the Revolutionary War also moving west, the family faces threats from British sympathizers and American rebels. Will freedom take root in America, like Stephanie’s young apple tree, or will the Venable family succumb to the hardships of frontier life?

And so the ambitious summer project began. Not that it ended in quite the way the girls were imagining. In fact, it sparked a flurry of trading, in which the girls somehow accumulated wealth in the form of unexpected friends, assorted animals, and other experiences "up and down the river," even as their collection of dimes and dollars seemed always to be slipping through their hands. In this third book of the Fairchild Family series, Bonnie and Debby Fairchild, occupying center stage in the family story, carry us through a summer season in the lovely hills of Kentucky of the early 1900s. Book jacket.

As winter arrives and the local school closes until summer, the Fairchild children continue their schooling in the parlor with the oldest, Althy, teaching.

Five adventures in Bonny's busy four-year-old life with her three sisters and brothers in the days of copper-toed shoes.

During her first year in a one-room school in the Kentucky hills, Bonnie has many exciting experiences, from getting her first book to playing an angel in a play.

For a doll contest at a party, a little girl chooses to enter a doll that seems least likely to win a prize.

Jamie wins the coveted role of a shepherd in the school Christmas play. When a blizzard cancels the show he is heartbroken.

When two families of cousins take turns visiting each other on Saturdays they always have a good time.

When Charley Cornett begins school, no one expects to ever see him carrying the flag, an honored privilege for being helpful. He's too curious. Then one day, Charley surprises everyone, and what he learns that day adds a great deal to his already very full life.

Thirty Haiku reflect a scene or thought about nature.

Relates the episodes in the life of Contrary Jenkins as he lived by the "law of contrary" in Tennessee and Arkansas.

The author, who grew up there, contrasts life in Appalachia, before the mines came, with life in Appalachia now, showing how and why it has become a poverty-stricken area.

The High Cost of Writing is a talk given by Mrs Ayars (Rebecca Caudill). The talk was given at Southeast Community College.

For a doll contest at a party, a little girl chooses to enter a doll that seems least likely to win a prize.

A boy takes his pet cricket to school where it first disturbs the class with its chirping, but then becomes the show-and-tell attraction.

In 1780, sixteen-year-old Ketty makes an adventurous and hard trip with her brother and others to French Lick on the Cumberland in frontier Tennessee.

A little girl and her neighborhood friends help a puppy get over his "great big scare." Grades 3-4.

A nine-year-old orphan has been promised that her week with the president of the orphanage board will be better than her favorite fairy tale, but everything starts out badly, until she meets a grandma "with all sorts of wonderful attachments."

Materials include correspondence, notes, and the second through the sixth and the final draft of the book, Higgins and the Great Big Scare, published in 1960.

A fifteen-year-old girl does not look forward to spending the summer on her cousins' Kentucky farm, but, as she shares the family's problem of drought, she begins to learn many things about her own interests and capacities.