Jean Karl Books

3 total works

Alice in Lace

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Published 1 March 1996

While planning a wedding as part of an assignment for her eighth-grade health class, Alice thinks about her father's and older brother's love lives and learns that you cannot prepare for all of life's decisions.

Walker's Crossing

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Published 1 September 1999

Ryan wants just one thing: to be a cowboy -- a "working" cowboy -- on the large Saddlebow Ranch in Wyoming, where he and his family live. Ryan, a tall seventh-grader, knows the dangers of ranch life: Once his father was cow boss, but now, after an injury, he is simply the ranch caretaker, seeing that fences are mended and watching over the family's few head of cattle. Even so, Ryan does not change his mind.

However, Ryan's older brother, Gil, sees dangers greater than injury ahead. He and the men who belong to the Mountain Patriots Association, a local militia group, are convinced that the United States government, foreign immigrants, and people who are racial minorities are going to take over the area. Not without a fight, however: The Mountain Patriots are armed for battle. It will take men, real men like them, Gil believes, to save their part of the West for the white race.

As the ranching community becomes increasingly divided between those who accept the views of the Mountain Patriots and those who do not, Ryan is torn. Is Gil right? Some of what he says sounds logical. Or are those who disagree, but who also sound sensible, right?

Clearly, confrontation and disaster are on the way. Ryan does not plan to be in the middle of it when it comes, but that is where he finds himself. And that is where, as a consequence, he learns what it really means to be a man, what it takes to build a good future, and how to find your place in a changing world.

Sang Spell

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Published 1 October 1998

Josh is hitchhiking from Boston to Dallas to begin a new life, trying to sort out the changes that have skewed his world since an accident killed his mother and made a mockery of his dreams. No longer will he be what he was -- an important person in a high school he loved. Instead he will be starting his junior year in a place where no one will know him, no one will care.

He wanders up a road he has taken away from the interstate, where he has been thumbing rides, looking for a village where he might find shelter from the unexpected August cold and rain. When a car comes along, it looks like a ride to somewhere. And that's what it proves to be. But the somewhere he finds is not the somewhere he expected. It is a place that knows him, knows the darkness inside of him; that offers food and shelter, but also confronts him with choices he does not know how to make. It probes his past, examines his possible futures, and finally pierces the wall of despair he has built around himself.

"Sang Spell" is a fantasy built on the hopes and dreams of a people who longed for a place of peace, for a way out of the dark and the rain. Some might think finding such a place to be a miracle, but not Josh. To him it is a nightmare, a prison he cannot escape. "Sang Spell" is an adventure into a place of forgotten people, the Melungeons, and into the boundaries created by the human mind.