Grade 6-8 What would a cultural exchange program be like on a galactic scale? Dairine Callahan wants to find out, and, without obtaining permission, makes plans to go, along with her older sister Nita, on a trip to another planet while alien wizards visit their home on Earth. When Dairine is found out and grounded, her surprisingly amenable father still allows her to host the guests as planned. Meanwhile, Nita; her best friend, Kit Rodriguez; and Kit's dog, Ponch, spend two weeks on Alaalu, a planet that seems halcyonic.
Colleen McCullough's sweeping saga of dreams, struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian Outback has enthralled readers the world over. This is the chronicle of three generations of Clearys, ranchers carving lives from a beautiful, hard land while contending with the bitterness, frailty, and secrets that penetrate their family. Most of all, it is the story of only daughter Meggie and her lifelong relationship with the haunted priest Father Ralph de Bricassart—an intense joining of two hearts and souls that dangerously oversteps sacred boundaries of ethics and dogma.
Now we are being treated to SKY OF STONE, which takes us with Homer "Sonny" Hickam back to Coalwood, West Virginia in the summer after his freshman year at college. Homer's taciturn father is at a crossroads in his life. His wife has left him and is living in Myrtle Beach. Sonny, looking forward to a summer of basking in the sun, meeting girls and helping his mother fix up the beach house, is packed and ready to go when he is called to the dormitory phone. His hopes for a languid summer are shattered. Knowing that there is no arguing with Elsie Hickam, Sonny reluctantly returns to the depressed mining town to a father more remote and uncommunicative than ever.
Unless is the story Reta Winters tells us as she endures the breakaway of Norah, her eldest daughter, from family, boyfriend, girlfriends and university. Every day Norah sits cross-legged on the northeast corner of Bloor and Bathurst, a begging bowl on her lap and a cardboard sign on her chest. GOODNESS, it says. Norah's defection from a normal life is an inexplicable mystery arising from the totally unlikely context of a loving family: Tom, the doctor father; Reta, the writer, translator, housewife mother; two younger sisters, Natalie and Christine; a treasured old dog, Pet; and their rambling old home on the outskirts of Orangetown, an hour's drive from Toronto.
"If you know David Baldacci only as a thriller writer, you need to read more of David Baldacci. In One Summer, he writes as beautifully and insightfully about the pathways of the human heart as he does about the corridors of power. The twists and turns in this hugely emotional and unforgettable novel come from the resilience of one father's spirit and the revelation of the love that binds a family, in this world and even beyond. If you read one book this summer, make it One Summer.
