Upon entering the sixth grade, straight-A student Jasper falls under the spell of the dreaded, irrepressible Cootch cousins.

In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay “Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves,” Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite’s fusion of gender identities: “Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: ‘i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body’ ... This is [Waite’s] genius ... to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence — to get around English’s pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and...” “In this arresting collection, Stacey Waite is a pathfinder, charting with disarming honesty, humor, pathos and willful perplexity the uncertain terrain of gender in ways that shatter assumptions, unsettle easy presumptions, and yet, through the sheer grace of her craft and deft language, that open us to the beauty of our strange human enterprise.” — Kwame Dawes

Will and his brother Robby have met aliens before, but their latest dinner guest, an alien named Saliva, makes them and their parents an offer they can't refuse. Their home is to become an intergalactic resort for space travelers: Club Earth. Will and Robby are thrilled. They'll be the only people on Earth having aliens sleep over.

Every year since 1961, football and basketball players at Middlebury College in Vermont pick up their wheelchair-bound fan, Butch, and bring him to the stadium sidelines to watch their games. At John Brown University, the volleyball team distributes candy to fans before each match. For years, fans attending a University of Maryland football game rubbed the bronze statue of their terrapin mascot, Testudo. Traditions like these are visible statements of school loyalty, and they are part of why college sports are unforgettable. College Sports Traditions: Picking Up Butch, Silent Night, and Hundreds of Others details not only the well-known traditions of major universities, but also the obscure customs of smaller schools. Approximately 1,200 traditions are captured, covering almost every college sport. It depicts such traditions as The Ohio State University’s “Script Ohio,” University of Kansas’s “Waving the Wheat,” Linfield College’s “End Zone Couches,” and even a list of traditions that involve streaking. The wide variety of traditions covered in this book are grouped thematically, including: Before the game During the game After a score After the game Mascot traditions Preseason traditions Traditions probably not university sanctioned Rivalries Yells, cheers, and chants From the crazy and eccentric to the touching and meaningful, these traditions connect fans and athletes across generations. The first of its kind, this comprehensive volume encompasses hundreds of universities and colleges throughout the U.S. Featuring 75 photos that bring many of these events to life, College Sports Traditions will be an entertaining read for every sports fan.

When Thérèse is chosen to do the coveted oral report on Ethan Allen, she learns a great deal about the Vermont hero and also discovers what pleasure she gets from writing and presenting the report.

Perfect humor for 2nd and 3rd graders. When Brandon has to go to Hannah’s house after school, she always gets to be the leader while he has to play her sidekick or some villain she’s out to destroy. Then the horrible Sunderland kids try to steal Hannah’s monster cat, Buttercup, and suddenly Brandon and Hannah have an exciting real-life mission on their hands. All the games of vampire hunter and enemy agent in the world couldn’t have prepared them for the task of saving Buttercup from the Sunderlands’ grubby clutches.