Books with author Meredith Sue Willis

Smart, sassy, and eleven years old, Billie Lee lives with her eccentric, multi-racial family in New Jersey. Then Billie's white cousin, Celia, shows up and changes everything. A sleepover at Celia's fancy suburban home releases a food of questions. How can Billie be Black but also White? How can she convince her best friend, Eutreece, that Billie hasn't betrayed their friendship? And when these kids get thrown together at a neighborhood barbecue, how can Billie and her friends accept one another long enough to solve the mystery of a neighbor named Neighbor, who has hidden something strange down by the canal? The answers to these questions challenge Billie far more than she ever thought possible.

BLAZING PENCILS is a practical, enjoyable guide to writing stories and essays. Based on a master teacher's decades of experience working with students of all ages, BLAZING PENCILS will encourage the aspiring young writer at every step of the process of creating fiction and nonfiction. This book offers clearly articulated concepts as well as time-tested suggestions and tips. Writing samples include quotations from the masters of English and American prose but also from dozens of young writers as they learn to master the literary arts.

Fourteen-year-old Melisandre Rossi lives in New York City with her mother. Meli, a self-identified weird teenager, far prefers exploring the museum to attending classes at her upscale private academy. Increasingly bored, she convinces her mother to let her transfer to an alternative public high school, where she can study ancient Chinese ceramics and interact with students even weirder than she is. Yet life grows more complicated, not less so, when she makes this transition. At home, she has to tolerate how her mother shares Too Much Information about her new boyfriends. At school, Meli must navigate the tricky social world of her peers, adjust to a curriculum that views all of Manhattan as the classroom, and make sense of her intensifying emotions toward a teacher. A summer trip to Italy, where Meli visits her Italian father and his new family, leaves her exhilarated but dizzy as her view of herself expands. Then Meli faces a terrible crisis: one of the darkest aspects of the wider world comes rushing into her life.