This book is great! It made English fun...almost. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Five Little Peppers Midway is a continuation of the lives of The Pepper Family. This is a heartwarming and amusing story that spans from baking pies to burglars to Mamsie's Wedding! You will just have to get this book for yourself to step back in time to simple living and loving families. Once you start reading this book you won't want to put it down!

This book is great for the education of Literature!

This old time thriller is so intensely melodramatic that one overlooks the impossible events related. This story moves one to tears, as its author designed it should. This book came out in 1867. Despite its old-fashioned melodrama if you give this book a chance I think you will be glad you read it. It is an outstanding type of its genre.

I read A Dog of Flanders by Ouida mainly out of curiosity. I wanted to read the first "boy and his dog" book written for children. I didn't expect much, and I was surprised when I began to enjoy the story late in the book.

The story is of a peasant boy, Nello, and his dog, Patrasche. The boy just wants to be an artist and see a painting by Rubens. The dog (who has very human feelings) just wants to help the boy reach his goal. The two face absolutely every hardship possible in their attempts.

To enjoy this story, you have to take it in the context of the time it was written. The book is really, really sentimental. Every play for emotion possible is made by the author. Early in the book, it even says (in a literal tone) that Nello and his grandfather would just lay down and die if anything ever happened to the dog. Patrasche was their "alpha and omega." All of the sentimentality really bothered me at the beginning. I'm used to modern writing and didn't take the overplay of emotion well. I had to take into account, though, that Ouida wrote in the romantic tradition, when this type of writing was common, especially in children's books. Looking at A Dog of Flanders as an example from the time period helped me to enjoy the novel even through its oversentimentality. Overall, A Dog of Flanders is a pretty decent read. Most children of today wouldn't love it. A Dog of Flanders is definately a worthy read as a curiosity piece, though.

Though I have known this story long time for 25 years or so, it was from animation. So it was different from waht I know. Basically it was same and I found the more details but I also foud some conflicts. Johan was 80 years old when Nello was 2 years old. His mother was very old or Johan was very old when he got his daughter. Nello died when he was 15 but animation was much younger. The problem I see is 15 years old boy is old enough to live by himself 100 years ago ( I might be wrong). Anyway setting of age is kinda wrong. By the way I read a book which is published in 1910 not this book. If this book is different, please let me know.

Ouida expresses depiction of the village in Belgium very beautifully.This also sadly beautiful tale written about Nello, and his dog, and Patrasche can make many people cry.@Nello works to one portion, though he is a boy, and he studies the importance of finishing alone. It is insisted that working hard at any work is important for this work.@Simultaneously, this work expresses the discrimination to a poor person.Nello who believed his future is a manly boy, being equal to the cold treatment by villagers.

The book Out of Nowhere, written by Ouida Stubestyen, is a very emotional book that consists of several outcasts trying to form a family. I think this book is very well written and the emotions are very realistic which makes them easy to relate to. My personal preference for a book is in an action or adventure novel though. This book does not match that criteria and as such it did not appeal to me. Even so, the characters May and Harley were very admireable people and their emotions made the novel interesting to read.

The story of a lost kid wanting a family is hardly a new one, but Ouida Sebestyen infuses it with new life and new insights in "Out of Nowhere." Her solemn, stark book is a good read for both the lonely, and those who realistically want a better life for themselves.

Harley Nunn leaves, fed up with his ever-shifting life with his promiscuous trailer-trash mom and her constant flow of boyfriends, in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. He soon acquires a travelling companion, a pit bull called Ish, who was abandoned as Harley feels he has been; soon after, the two are given a ride by an elderly woman named May, who is trying to forge a new life for herself after her husband left her. Though she doesn't want the responsibility of a boy and a dog, she allows Harley to come with her to her run-down little house.

There they find a relentlessly Pollyannaish girl, Singer, who tells them that a junk-collecting drifter called Bill has been living -- and collecting junk -- in the house. Bill and May clash when he returns from the hospital (after setting his bedpan on fire to create a diversion while he escaped), with her ordering him to leave and him refusing. Singer offers philosophical advice, while Harley struggles with his lack of roots and his longing for even the vestiges of a home. But it seems that the collection of lost souls will never be able to exist in peace. Only a tragedy can give them the true soul of a family.

Every sitcom has brought up the concept that family is defined more by love than by blood. Sebestyen adds extra dimensions to this by producing a group of misfits -- not all of them get along, and more often than not they don't. But neither do they despise one another. The paths of Bill and May make it difficult to accept Harley, and Harley's past makes him increasingly desperate for love.

Harley is an unusually deep teenage character with a quietly likeable personality. Anyone who has felt alone or unloved -- or who HAS been alone or unloved -- will sympathize with his longing for someone to care about what happens to him. His outbursts as he realizes that nobody is going to keep him on are well-written, as are his feelings of guilt after Ish is injured. Singer is a little harder to care about, as Sebestyen seems to have tried a little too hard to make her relentlessly optimistic -- a few chinks in her armor would have made her seem more human and interesting. May is too similar to Harley for her own comfort, wounded by the loss of her lying husband and closed off emotionally, even to someone who needs her. Bill is the kindly curmudgeon, a cranky old guy who unconsciously becomes the paternal figure that Harley lacks. His almost comic stubbornness will win over most of the readers.

People who need continuous hijinks and action won't like this book -- the pace is gradual and attention is paid to the characters. Aside from a minor accident, it's all introspection drama, with a splash of comedy from time to time. Sebestyen's style is informative but kind of stark, with all the detail inside the characters' heads. She also does not lapse into the preachy "all you need is love to be a family" cliche, instead allowing the readers to draw their own conclusions from what happens to whom. As a result, the book's finale feels less like an end than like the climax of a very long beginning.

For a beautiful, carefully written story filled with likeably odd characters, readers can't do better than "Out of Nowhere." An excellent work of fiction for any age.

OUT OF NOWHERE is quite different from most books that I've read over the past. It's not very well-known, but I went to my town's library one time and I saw this book on one of the racks and it caught my eye so I picked it up and decided to try it. Well, I did and it turned out to be very good. I never even realized I'd be interested in this kind of book, but as soon as I started to read it, I just couldn't put it down. I wanted to see what would happen at the end.

This book is full of emotions but with hardly any action. There are some humorous parts, but this is more like a serious book rather than comedy. Anyways, this book is about a 13-year-old boy named Harley who just got abandoned in an Arizona desert by his outgoing mother and her boyfriend. Soon, Harley comes across an abandoned dog, Ish, who he befriends. He also meets May, a woman in her late 40s, Singer, 16-year-old girl, and Bill, May's tenent. The five have their own problems they need to learn how to face.

This book was solidly written. If you're looking for a good book to read this summer, then go pick this one up. I highly recommend it for any teen.

Shadows After Dark is the story of women living in two different dimensions, on two different planets, whose lives cross and make connections. Kyril comes to Earth to discover what the strange illness is that killed her lover on her home planet. She is sure that it is something that was brought back from a previous visit. She has also been infatuated with a woman she met on a previous trip, Kathryn, who is searching for a soul mate and has been fixated on Kyril for two years after a brief meeting in a lesbian bar. What Kyril will quickly discover is that her deceased mate contracted AIDS. This is a special threat to Kyril's homeworld since all of the people there are vampires. It turns out that her people have been crossing the dimensional time line to live on Earth, and yes, occasionally feed off of its people, for centuries. Kathryn ironically is an AIDS researcher who is trying to find the cause and cure of this epidemic on her own planet. The book is about how these two join forces, become lovers and try to overcome some significant cultural differences to be with each other. It's an interesting book, but not one for those who are looking for creatures of the night who are running around draining humans and sleeping in coffins during the day. It's sort of a blend of scifi, vampirism, lesbian romance, coming together of different cultures and social awareness lecture all in one book. It's a good first novel for Crozier and the ending is open ended enough that, if she wants to, she could pick up this pair in a later book.

When I first started to read this book I wasn't very into it and I put it down after a while. I went back to it later and reread the whole thing. It's about a girl named Jackie who is kidnapped and locked into a concrete cellar type place, with pretty much nothing to help her keep her mind but a ream of typing paper and a typewriter. She writes letters to herself and other people. At first I didn't like the very mysterious ending; you didn't find out if she lived, or why she was kidnapped, etc. The plot was a bit slow but interesting and I liked it because I would have probably done and thought the same things she had, such as thinking of all the different possibilities as to what was going on. Some parts of this book were a bit confusing. In Jackie's typing she referred to people that were unknown to the reader. Overall, this was a great book and I would recommend it to anyone.

I read The Girl in the Box once in my life, and that was about 6 years ago, when I was 11. Ever since then I have searched for it off and on. I was beginning to doubt the book ever existed, but it left such an outstanding impression in my mind that I have always wanted to re-read it. The plot of Jackie McGee being mysteriously kidnapped and locked pointlessly in an underground cellar is a freaky vision. But what made the books message really strong was the descriptive way Sebestyen explained her ordeal, even when the girl's situation was grim. It was a mental blowout, how moving the book was, and the ending just drops off, leaving nothing known. In some ways I like that, some ways I don't. But I think the neutral ending is one of the main reasons I am so anxious to re-read it, to see if I can find a hidden ending somewhere this time around. The book is wonderfully written and mentally explorative, great for most ages. Read it, you won't be disappointed!

This was one of the most incredible books I have ever read in my LIFE. This book would have been a great movie. People stop looking for excuses to hate it. You will leave with some sort of message. I read it when I was about 15 or 16 and throughout the entire book, I felt like I was in the cellar myself. I would get this incredible sense of claustrophobia when I picked the book up. If a book has that much impact on someone, it is a GOOD book. Now I am 21, and I understand so much more. Being more mature, I see how young the girl was and it has a bigger impact. When I read it, I didn't really 'grasp' the fact that she was so young. I just felt bad for her. When you can remember the plot and character of a book after all these years, it is a good book. It makes an impression on your life, and teaches you to think of realities of life. You become more aware of the things around you, and more appreciative toward the people you love.

As a class for 8th grade reading we read "Words By Heart" by Quida Sebestyen. It was a great book in a way because it delt with racism and how some people couldn't deal with a black family being in their all-white community. Even though I thing it was good in that way I also some what believe it was very boring and not very interesting for fids our age. The book also shows how people overcome some things that are happening and make friends with a black family and at the end helping them because they realize that in the beginning they were wrong. They also realized that they should treat them as though they would any other family in the community. That is why I thought it was an ok book.

Words by Heart is a sad but good story. Lena went to a scripture contest. After the contest, she comes home and finds something disturbing. Lena thinks that this is a warning since her family is the only black family in the neighborhood. Competition and anxiety keep you at the edge of your seat. Nonetheless, tragedy and sadness come to her family.

i liked this book because what lena sez is true and cuz i like that they talk about the Bible.