Angela Culver left this world with one last wish. She requests that her five sons, all born of different fathers, embark on a seven-day, 275-mile bicycle trip across southern Iowa. She knows she failed them as a mother, protector, provider, and source of comfort while she was alive, but Angela now wants them to rediscover the importance of family. The five half-brothersRobert, Herbert, Philbert, Tolbert, and Albertlive separate and very diverse lives from each other. They must each gather the emotional, physical, and psychological strength to complete the ride. The journey from the Missouri River to the Mississippi River creates not only sore, tender muscles but also conjures aching, tender memories. To succeed in this trek, they must be able to forgive: forgive Angela for her failures as a mother, forgive one anothers youth for the roles each played against the others, and forgive themselves for the self-contempt that they have been carrying since escaping the house of their childhood. They learn about themselves and each other, and they begin to form the bonds that might allow them to be full brothers to each other.

Book 7 in a series of heart-warming pony tales packed with expert advice from three times Olympic medallist and Grand Slam winner, Pippa Funnell, on everything you ever wanted to know about horses. With the help of Tilly and the team at Silver Shoe Farm, Magic Spirit has made a brilliant recovery and looks like he could become a top competition horse. Tilly is fascinated when Angela shares with her what it's like to have a partnership with an eventing superstar as they visit her own favourite horse, Pride and Joy. Collect all 18 titles in this series of irresistible, uplifting pony adventures, packed with expert, up-to-date advice from the author as well as a helpful glossary and black and white illustrations.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness. Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.

Contains African American folktales adapted and illustrated by various authors and artists; folksongs and hymns; historical information; and profiles of noteworthy African Americans from diverse professions.