Now that Ramona is eight years old, she's doing all kinds of things she's never done before. She's in a new school with a new teacher, and best of all, she takes the school bus-all by herself! But since her mother works and her daddy's in art school, Ramona has to stay with old Mrs. Kemp every day until Beezus comes for her. And as if all that isn't bad enough, she has to be nice to four-year-old Wila Jean. Ramona knows the family is depending on...

The adventures of seven-year-old Rufus Moffat, living with his widowed mother and older siblings including his encounter with an invisible piano player and his attempts at ventroliquism.

A story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country ranks high in the annals of boy and dogdom. Gipson, in earlier books, has evinced an evocative quality which recaptures for the reader the sounds, the smells, the sights of the region he knows and loves, recaptures too the emotional quality, the moods of his central figure. This was particularly true in Hound-Dog Man, which for some readers was marred by the vernacular. In Old Yeller the story...