Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
Ten cousins. One oak tree in Johnny D’s field. And a whole ridge full of ways to get in trouble before supper.A CHILDHOOD WORTH REMEMBERINGRJ is thirteen, the oldest of the boys, and he has nine cousins who meet him under the same oak tree every morning at nine. Johnny D, Ricky, Mikey, Freddy, Petey, Chuck, Charlie, Duane, Carl, and RJ are cousins by blood and brothers by choice. Their fathers, Billy Dean, Edward, Willie, and Donnie Paul, are brothers too, raised alone by Grandma after Pa died young. Nobody has much. Everybody has each other. Every Saturday night the boys sleep on Grandma’s hardwood floors under quilts she stitched by hand.THE TROUBLE THEY FOUNDThey build a fire the week before Thanksgiving and leave their jackets hanging in the tree when the fire truck comes, so everyone in the county knows exactly who did it. They try chewing tobacco on a dare and turn green one by one. RJ ropes his father’s prize pig a little too tightly. There is mud from a new water well tracked across a clean kitchen floor, a sock-sliding contest that ends the second Mom opens the door, a rooster who chases Petey out of the chicken coop for good, a fall off Uncle Donnie Paul’s VW van that ends in a cast covered with magic-marker signatures, and a camping trip where the bear growling outside the tent turns out to be Johnny D snoring.AND A SISTER WHO GETS EVENEmma is fourteen and more than a match for any of them. When Johnny D and Ricky secretly soup up their new three-wheeler before handing her the handlebars, she takes off like a bolt of lightning, flips it near the rock pile, stands up spitting grass, and hollers at both of them. Her revenge arrives weeks later, in the dark, disguised as candy. It is not candy.FAITH LIVED OUT LOUDSunday mornings begin with Grandma’s cathead biscuits, gravy, and scrambled eggs, and end with the whole crowd piled into her station wagon, early enough for Sunday school. Sister Pearl makes the Bible stories come alive and shows the children how to use them. The preacher preaches with an authority RJ later understands. It is in that church that RJ invites Jesus into his life. And when a neighbor’s dog tears up the flower bed Aunt Beulah worked all spring to grow, RJ watches his mother and his aunts show him what the Golden Rule looks like when grown people actually live it.WRITTEN FOR YOUNG READERSSet in a time of party lines, corded telephones, wooden Mickey Mantle bats, and a hot, dry summer in 1975, these seven short chapters explain themselves as they go. Unfamiliar words and objects come with a plain definition right there in the sentence, so a young reader never has to stop and ask what a station wagon, a cane pole, or a cathead biscuit is. The chapters are short enough for one sitting and gentle enough for bedtime, and every scrape the boys get into ends with a lesson their parents make sure they keep.PERFECT FORFamilies reading aloud together, grandparents who want to share a childhood their grandchildren never got to see, Sunday school classrooms and church libraries, and any young reader who likes funny stories about kids who mean well and get in trouble anyway.Life on the Ridge is a place where the phone is attached to a cord, the moms are home, the ice cream at Grandma’s house is vanilla, and ten boys who love each other are always one dare away from the next story worth telling.
