As a 12-year old boy, Sandy Preston loves reading books about the great knights of the Middle Ages. One day in the public library, a kindly librarian shows him a book about the famous knight, Don Quixote, written by Miguel Cervantes more than 400 years ago. While reading this book, Sandy is sent through a time warp to 17th century Spain, where he meets the very same Don Quixote who is in the book. Sandy gets to accompany Quixote on a series of adventures. Quixote explains to Sandy that it is the duty of a true knight errant to hold to his own beliefs and values, no matter what other people think or say. As they go through many of the adventures originally described by Cervantes, Sandy begins to see Quixote’s nobility. Sandy adopts the principles of knight errantry as his own. Quixote shares with his friends the story of how “Sir Sandy” has now come to represent a new generation of knight errantry. Thus ennobled, Sandy finds the time warp has re-opened, allowing him to get home just before his Mom returns from work. Over dinner, Sandy explains to his Mom what it is about knights that is so important to believe in. It’s about setting a moral standard to live by, even if others can’t see its value. Sandy’s Mom offers Sandy the opportunity to demonstrate this new standard through his schoolwork, and through helping those in need.

Finalist for the 2019 Whistler Independent Book Awards, Semi-finalist for 2019 Kindle Book Awards, Literary Fiction, and Honorable Mention 2020 Writers' Digest Self-Published Book Awards. In this family saga, love and loss are bound together by a country always at war During WWI, Lukia Mazurets, a Ukrainian farmwife, delivers her eighth child while her husband is serving in the Tsar’s army. Soon after, she and her children are forced to flee the invading Germans. Over the next fourteen years, Lukia must rely on her wits and faith to survive life in a refugee camp, the ravages of a typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik revolution, unimaginable losses, and one daughter’s forbidden love. Sunflowers Under Fire is a heartbreakingly intimate novel that illuminates the strength of the human spirit. Based on the true stories of her grandmother’s ordeals, author Diana Stevan captures the voices of those who had little say in a country that is still being fought over.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra finds refuge from his difficult childhood by imagining the adventures of a brave but clumsy knight. This fictionalized first-person biography in verse of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra follows the early years of the child who grows up to pen Don Quixote, the first modern novel. The son of a vagabond barber-surgeon, Miguel looks to his own imagination for an escape from his family's troubles and finds comfort in his colorful daydreams. At a time when access to books is limited and imaginative books are considered evil, Miguel is inspired by storytellers and wandering actors who perform during festivals. He longs to tell stories of his own. When Miguel is nineteen, four of his poems are published, launching the career of one of the greatest writers in the Spanish language. Award-winning author Margarita Engle's distinctive picture book depiction of the childhood of the father of the modern novel, told in a series of free verse poems, is enhanced by Raúl Colón's stunning illustrations. Back matter includes a note from both the author and illustrator as well as additional information on Cervantes and his novel Don Quixote.

The enduring and engaging guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition. Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven’t because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. Newly expanded and updated to include standout works from the twenty-first century as well as essential readings in science (from the earliest works of Hippocrates to the discovery of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs), The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of six literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, poetry, and science—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to Cormac McCarthy, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Aristotle to Stephen Hawking—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing. The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there’s no reason you can’t read and enjoy Shakespeare’s sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the “Great Books” without a guide and a plan. Bauer will show you how to allocate time to reading on a regular basis; how to master difficult arguments; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. In her best-selling work on home education, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children; that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In The Well-Educated Mind, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading. Followed carefully, her advice will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

The Female Quixote completely inverts the adventures of Don Quixote. While the latter mistook himself for the hero of a Romance, Arabella believes she is the fair maiden. She believes she can fell a hero with one look and that any number of lovers would be happy to suffer on her behalf.

A retelling of the exploits of an idealistic Spanish country gentleman and his shrewd squire who set out, as knights of old, to search for adventure, right wrongs, and punish evil.