Books with author John Glander

Melissa is fussing. Of the four teenage girls sharing the club room at Ashwood Stables, she is the most likely to fuss, usually over her own appearance. With the annual show at Hightower Equestrian Centre coming ever closer, she is determined that she will be perfect. Unfortunately she is more concerned with her appearance than with her riding. Lucinda is concerned that she will not put in enough practice.Unknown to all four of the girls, there is about to be something of an upheaval in their lives. It arrives in the shape of Tracey, a girl discovered by Robert, the yard owner. She has taken Curtains on loan while his owner is at university. Since she is the same age as the other four girls, she has a right to use the facilities at the stables, and Robert has decided they should train together. This would have been perfectly acceptable, only Tracey is both common and talented.It is Melissa who finds her presence offensive and threatening. She is the one who sets out to prove that she is superior, in all senses of the word, and she is the one to fall flat on her face, though in the literal sense it is another part of her anatomy which takes the fall.Tracey has no desire to cause any trouble, but Lucinda and Chloë decide that her talent needs nurturing, she belongs with them and it will do Melissa good to have a little competition. The problem is that Melissa is being pushed too hard. Lucinda suspects it is her step-mother, Georgia, who is at the root of all her problems. Georgia is young, and is inclined to act like one of the girls. Melissa will not talk about any home problem.Dealing with the problems so they all remain Ashwood Girls is the task which faces Lucinda. It is not going to be easy.

Melissa is having a great deal of trouble with her young step-mother. Her own mother is visiting from her racing yard in Ireland, complete with her jockey boyfriend. Melissa finds balancing them hard. Then there is a break in at Ashwood. Chief suspect is a young lad linked to Tracey and some people think she was involved. Melissa knows she isn't, but is afraid to say how she knows. She must win at the show, her father demands it, but people can be pushed too far and Melissa stands up and tells the truth.

"A sonnet is a moment's monument," said Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a sonnet about sonnets.The sonnets in this collection—whether they capture moments of perception, recognition, despair, or celebration—reveal how great an amount of feeling, insight, and experience can be concentrated into a mere fourteen lines.Here are classics such as Milton's "On His Blindness," Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," and Frost's "The Oven Bird," juxtaposed with the mischievous wit of Rupert Brooke's "Sonnet Reversed," the lyric defiance of Mona Van Duyn's "Caring for Surfaces," and the comic poignancy of Philip Larkin's "To Failure." From the lovelorn laments of Dante and Petrarch to the artful heights of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, from the masterpieces of Wordsworth and Keats to the innovations of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and James Merrill, the sonnet has proved both versatile and enduring. This delightful anthology displays the incredible range and power of the verse form that has inspired poets across the centuries.

Melissa is in love with a new 16 year old boy at the paired boy's school. She pursues him and her riding suffers. Cassandra is in love with a bar of chocolate, but needed desperately to lose weight to impress her cousins. Tracey is determined to win, but it is possible the cost is too high. Lucinda is in trouble which may prevent her riding in the Moorwood Park One Day Event. Chlo observes and records how all these problems are resolved. She also pokes her nose into all of them in an attempt to ensure her friends come through all their troubles without making a mess of their lives.

Cassandra has real problems with her weight and bigger problems with her cousins. Her aunty Joanna thinks she is wonderful, and her girls, Anastasia and Micha, can do no wrong. Micha is supposed to be an amazing rider. Joanna is always complaining about Cassandra being too large and no good as a writer. Cassandra feels must prove to herself she is the better person, and better rider and she must overcome her desire for chocolate. As usual the help of the girls brings her through.

Tracey lives in a different world from the other girls. She comes from a council estate, goes to the local school and has ordinary parents. Since starting at Ashwood Stables, she is learning to move in both worlds. There are some people who dislike the idea and who would like to land her in trouble. There is a complicated theft going on. She is targeted as the weak link in the Ashwood Girls while the real target is Melissa's father. Working together, the girls overcome suspicion and solve the problem.

The truth about aliens is there are no aliens. Anthony Jones knows this for a fact. He has known it for a couple of years, ever since Spike Black came to live in Homerton Layne. Spike appears to be a fairly normal boy with his biggest problem being the way his hair sticks up. He is also a genius and he comes from a world somewhere on the other side of the galaxy. He and his parents dialled a wrong number on a transport booth and land on Earth. Since then they have been trying to find ways of contacting the Great Network so they can get home.When the two friends move to Secondary School, they meet Delores Smith, the most beautiful girl in the class and Maude, her best friend. Delores invites Spike to the school dance. Spike has read at dances it is the job of the boy to sweep the girl off her feet, which he does, with the help of an anti-gravity machine. There is chaos and some awkward questions, which leaves the boys in the position of having to let the girls in on the secret. This leads Anthony to discover Maude is rather like him. It also sets off a chain of increasingly weird events.

Jodie Ragland is a fairly typical teenage girl who lives in a small town. She has four main problems, spots which are not only on her face but her bottom, body hair which grows at a frightening rate, braces on her teeth, and her mother. When Patti, her mother, has breast enlargement, and makes a big thing of displaying her new assets, Jodie knows there is something going on. Jodie suspects the recent return of Tony, her father, complete with his second wife, Corrine only eight years older than Jodie, has something to do with her mother's body change.Her father is determined to get her away from her mother and doesn't appear to have spotted any of the flaws with this idea. Jodie finds out her mother has been taking art lessons at the local college. Patti is a natural artist and doing well, and it appears she might be building a real relationship with Howard, the lecturer. Life is getting complicated.

Toby is fascinated by all things electronic. He has his own shed in the garden where he can work with recovered electronic equipment. It is while he is trying out a new gadget to pick up satellite television that he gets a set of programmes which seem to be wrong. The news is all about the King Of France dying. The news readers are the people they see every day, just differently dressed.His best friend Andy works out that something odd is happening. She doesn't think that it is a trick. It seems that not only television, but the whole of the world is digital and there are a whole series of Earths where different things happen. On one world there are no old people and Andy is in the Army. Having found out about them, it is not hard for Toby to work out a way of getting between them, and that is when the trouble really begins.

A delightfully ghoulish array of specters and sorceresses, witches and ghosts, hags and apparitions haunt these pages–a literary parade of phantoms and shades to add to the revelry of All Hallow’s Eve.From Homer to Horace, Pope to Poe, Randall Jarrell to James Merrill, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil channels Aeneas’s wife from the afterlife, Baudelaire lays bare the wiles of the incubus, and Emily Dickinson records two souls conversing in a crypt, in poems that call out to be read aloud, whether around the campfire or the Ouija board. From ballads and odes, to spells and chants, to dialogues and incantations, here is a veritable witches’ brew of poems from the spirit world.

In nineteenth-century America, poetry was an integral part of everyday life. The two volumes of The Library of America’s American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century reveal the vigor and diversity of a tradition embracing solitary visionaries and congenial storytellers, humorists and dissidents, songwriters and philosophers. These extraordinary anthologies reassess America’s poetic legacy with a comprehensive sweep that no previous anthology has attempted.Extending chronologically from the classic couplets of Philip Freneau to the pioneering free verse of Walt Whitman, this first volume charts the formation of a distinctly American poetry. Here, in generous selections, are the major figures: Poe, Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier—as well as such unexpected contributors as the landscape painter Thomas Cole, the actress Fanny Kemble, and the presidents John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln.This collection offers the unique opportunity to appreciate anew such classics as Whittier’s “Snow-Bound,” Bryant’s “Forest Hymn,” and Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” while discovering a world of less familiar pleasures: the mystical sonnets of Jones Very, the Romantic fantasias of Maria Gowen Brooks, the stirring political poems of Joel Barlow and John Pierpont, and the somber and undervalued late lyrics of Longfellow.Woven among the poetry of the early nineteenth century is a wealth of popular ballads, recitations, and songs both secular and religious: “Home, Sweet Home,” “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” From Lydia Maria Child’s Thanksgiving poem (“Over the river and through the wood”) to George Pope Morris’s “The Oak” (“Woodman, spare that tree!”), these pages ring with the phrases that have become part of the national memory.Unprecedented in its textual authority, the anthology includes newly researched biographical sketches of each poet, a year-by-year chronology of poets and poetry from 1800 to 1900, and extensive notes.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

At last in a deluxe collector's edition boxed set, the most complete and authoritative anthology of 19th century American poetry ever publishedFrom the lyrics of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to folk ballads and moving spirituals, one of our nation's greatest cultural legacies is the distinctly American poetry that arose during the nineteenth century. Unprecedented in its comprehensive sweep and textual authority, and now presented for the first time in a deluxe two-volume boxed set, the Library of America's acclaimed anthology American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century reveals for the first time the full beauty and diversity of that tradition. The century's greatest poets are here in generous selections: Dickinson, Poe, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman. Alongside are the now-undervalued achievements of Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, and Holmes, as well as poems just finding full recognition: mystical sonnets by Jones Very, the Romantic fantasias of Maria Gowen Brooks, the modernist stirrings of Stephen Crane. Also here are American Indian poetry in nineteenth-century versions, a rich gathering of anonymous folk songs, and popular spirituals and hymns, like "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear." The anthology includes a newly researched biographical sketch of each poet and a year-by-year chronology of poets and poems from 1800 to 1900.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.