Pub Date: October, 12 2010

Price: $16.99

Hard Cover

Publisher: Delacort Books for Young Readers

ISBN 10: 0385738374

ISBN 13: 978-0385738378

Page Count: 272

Ages 9-12+

TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL T.

Lots of families have secrets. Little-Known Fact: My family has an antebellum house with a locked wing—and I’ve got a secret of my own.

I thought getting kicked out of the Gifted & Talented program—or not being “pegged,” as Mama said—¬was the worst thing that could happen to me. W-r-o-n-g, wrong. I arrived in Tweedle, Georgia, to spend the summer with Granny and Gramps, only to find no sign of them. When they finally showed up, Cousin Isaac was there too, with his trumpet in hand, and I found myself having to pretend to be thrilled about watching my musical family rehearse for the town's Anniversary Spectacular. It was h-a-r-d, hard. Meanwhile, I, Maebelle T.-for-No-Talent Earl, set out to win a blue ribbon with an old family recipe. But what was harder and even more wrong than any of that was breaking into the locked wing of my grandparents’ house, trying to learn the Truth with a capital T about Josiah T. Eberlee, my long-gone-but-not-forgotten relation. To succeed, I couldn't be a solo act. I’d need my new friends, a basset hound named Cotton, the strength of my entire family, and a little help from a secret code.

With grace and humor and a heaping helping of little-known facts, Bethany Hegedus incorporates the passions of the North and the South and bridges the past and the present in this story about one summer in the life of a sassy Southern girl and her trumpet-playing adopted Northern cousin.

Book Teaser:

I folded the note. A part of me wondered if they really had tried to wake me, or if Isaac just wanted to get Granny and Gramps away from the house so he could tattle on me. Maybe the note they had really wanted to write went something like this:

Dear Maebelle,

Not only are you no longer our one and only, you are no longer an Eberlee-Earl. Isaac told us what you did—tossing that diaper on his trumpet—and given your actions, we can no longer call you family. We can’t stand to be around you. So we left. We hereby bequeath Oak Alley to you, and know that you will live in spinsterhood—a shut-in for the rest of your life, following in old Edith’s footsteps—as punishment for your crime.

No longer your loving grandparents,

Angus T. and Ivory Ann

PS: Granny and Gramps are coming with me to Chicago. We’re going to play the jazz joints there. Sorry we couldn’t stay but you are too hideous to be around. So glad we’re not blood family, Isaac

Pub Date: Spring 2009

Price: $17.95

Jacketed Hard Cover

ISBN: 978-1-934813-02-7

Page Count: 306

Ages 12+

BETWEEN US BAXTERS

It’s hard to be a "Black Sheep Baxter," at least for 12-year-old Polly. From a poor white family, Polly’s best friend, Timbre Ann Biggs, is black, making them the only "salt-and-pepper" friends in town. Her mom keeps secrets, her dad turns to the "devil’s drink," and her rich, mean Meemaw makes Sunday dinners a chore. But in that fall of 1959, life in quiet Holcolm County starts to heat up. One by one, thriving colored businesses burn to the ground. When someone throws a note wrapped around a brick through the window of Biggs Repair, Polly worries that Timbre Ann will be blinded by the color of her skin and forget they were ever as close as Polly’s mom and Timbre Ann’s Aunt Henri have always been. When a tragic fire brings everything to a head, the spotlight falls on Polly’s family. Sensitively painting a vivid portrait of the Jim Crow South, Polly’s inspiring story captures the defiant spirit of youth in an oppressive small town, just as the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement begin to sprout.

Read What Writers Are Saying About Between Us Baxters:

"In Between Us Baxters, Bethany Hegedus has created that most difficult and wonderful thing in literature: a real family -- complex people who are loving, quarrelsome, generous, impatient, foolish, wise -- and ultimately courageous. The reader will not only recognize each of the Baxters, but come to root for and even love them."

—Norma Fox Mazer, Newbery honor award winner, and author of Ten Ways to Make My Sister Disappear and The Missing Girl

"Between Us Baxters is an important page-turner. I found myself wondering how a novel with so much heart could be so heart-stoppingly suspenseful!”

—Tim Wynne-Jones, author of A Thief in the House of Memory