Floyd is forced to ear a big plastic collar after getting stitches, and Sweetcakes teases him unmercifully. Floyd is terribly depressed! Jack just can't stand by and let Floyd suffer, so he and his doggie sidekicks teach Sweetcakes a lesson.

The Barkley's School for Dogs will be marching in the town's 100th anniversary parade...and so will another neighborhood canine school, Howl's Dog City. Jack and his friends are set on outshining their rivals. But having fun and getting along beats competition, paws down!

The local vet is hanging around Barkley School, and the dogs aren't too thrilled. Blondie thinks that the doc is there to see Fred -- it's more than puppy love for those two humans! But when Tazz gets hurt, having a doctor nearby is the best thing for all the dogs at Barkley.

Because of their popularity, books in series are great vehicles for fostering literacy among all types of readers, who are almost always adamant about reading every title in the series, in series order. Yet traditional information sources on children's and YA literature include very little about series fiction, so librarians often have difficulty managing this literature. This guide will be a rich resource and time-saver for librarians who work with children. It introduces users to the best and most popular fiction series of today, covering more than 1,000 series with over 10,000 titles, appropriate for elementary readers. Annotations also indicate series and titles accepted by some of the popular electronic reading programs (e.g., Accelerated Reading, Reading First). A numbered list of titles in the series follows.

At the dog run in the park, Barkley's classmates meet Jingles. He is a jolly Eskimo dog who is spreading Christmas cheer. Floyd and Bubba think Jingles's human must be Santa. Jack is not too sure. Is Jingles a real holiday hound visiting from the North Pole?

Adrian Mole's first love, Pandora, has left him; a neighbor, Mr. Lucas, appears to be seducing his mother (and what does that mean for his father?); the BBC refuses to publish his poetry; and his dog swallowed the tree off the Christmas cake. "Why" indeed.