Jerry Spinelli

From the Publisher: Just like other kids, Zinkoff rides his bike, hopes for snow days, and wants to be like his dad when he grows up. But Zinkoff also raises his hand with all the wrong answers, trips over his own feet, and falls down with laughter over a word like "Jabip." Other kids have their own word to describe him, but Zinkoff is too busy to hear it. He doesn't know he's not like everyone else. And one winter night, Zinkoff's differences show...

As Palmer comes of age, he must either accept the violence of being a wringer at his town's annual Pigeon Day or find the courage to oppose it.

Seventh-grader John "Crash" Coogan has always been comfortable with his tough, aggressive behavior, until his relationship with an unusual Quaker boy and his grandfather's stroke make him consider the meaning of friendship and the importance of family.

Mourning the loss of his mother, nine-year-old David forms an unlikely friendship with independent, quirky thirteen-year-old Primrose, as the two help each other deal with what is missing in their lives.

"George 'Suds' Morton competes with his third-grade classmates to earn the first 'halo' of the year for good behavior, but being good turns out to be more stressful than he anticipated"--

Still moping months after being dumped by her Arizona boyfriend Leo, fifteen-year-old Stargirl, a home-schooled free spirit, writes "the world's longest letter" to Leo, describing her new life in Pennsylvania.

Living with her warden father in an apartment above a 1950s prison, Cammie O'Reilly struggles to come to terms with the loss of her mother, who died saving her from harm when she was a baby, and interacts with some of the reformed inmates.

When the school assigns each eighth-grader the name of a teenager who died in the past year as a lesson in mortality, Worm Tarnauer, who thrives on being invisible, doesn't count on Becca Finch, the seventeen-year-old car crash victim who changes everything.

A little boy ponders the many possible jobs in his future, from paper-plane folder and puppy-dog holder to mixing-bowl licker and tin-can kicker.

Newbery medalist Jerry Spinelli has penned his early autobiography with all the warmth, humor, and drama of his best-selling fiction. And don't miss the author's highly anticipated new novel, Dead Wednesday!
"A master of those embarrassing, gloppy, painful, and suddenly wonderful things that happen on the razor's edge between childhood and full-fledged adolescence" —The Washington Post
From first memories through high...