School Days (Chemin-d’Ecole) is a captivating narrative based on Patrick Chamoiseau’s childhood in Fort-de-France, Martinique. It is a revelatory account of the colonial world that shaped one of the liveliest and most creative voices in French and Caribbean literature today. Through the eyes of the boy Chamoiseau, we meet his severe, Francophile teacher, a man intent upon banishing all remnants of Creole from his students’ speech. This domineering man is succeeded by an equally autocratic teacher, an Africanist and proponent of “Negritude.” Along the way we are also introduced to Big Bellybutton, the class scapegoat, whose tales of Creole heroes and heroines, magic, zombies, and fantastic animals provide a fertile contrast to the imported French fairy tales told in school. In prose punctuated by Creolisms and ribald humor, Chamoiseau infuses the universal terrors, joys, and disappointments of a child’s early school days with the unique experiences of a Creole boy forced to confront the dominant culture in a colonial school. School Days mixes understanding with laughter, knowledge with entertainment—in ways that will fascinate and delight readers of all ages.

Inspirational and humorous autobiographical essays on coming of age in a small western Pennsylvania river town during WW II, the Korean and Viet-Nam Wars. Young William fought World War II from a fox-hole that he and his childhood friends dug and in which he was wounded. He believed that since he graduated from a smoky, mill-town high school, he might not easily get admitted to college, so he applied to fourteen of them. After graduating from college with honors, he describes getting a PhD, a less-than-heroic stint in the military and becoming a professor and business consultant. A continuing theme is his relationship with “the girl of his dreams,” a beautiful redhead who he met at 14 and to whom he has been married for more than a half century. He describes his older Brother, who fought in Korea and came home to live the life of a playboy until he met the love of his life, his nurturing Mother and a Father who set an example to which he still aspires. The reader will learn about things as diverse as the Whiskey rebellion, teenage behavior before the sexualization of culture, a useful decision paradigm created on Omaha Beach and how to impress a girl by tasting her hair. The book ends with musings on how two very different people can come together and create a happy and enduring marriage. Anyone interested in what life and relationships were like in the middle of the 20th Century, when three wars consumed the daily attention of the nation, will find this book to be interesting, thought-provoking and entertaining.

"Dorothy Dale's School Rivals" by Margaret Penrose. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.