Grandma, how old is she?" "Oh I don't know." Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.

With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world.

Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.

Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.

Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us hears the voices of the young as they struggle toward adulthood.

...they'd just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn't they?...Trouble is, Mrs. Dowdel observed, after you've turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.