Full AspenCat Catalog

"Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I...

While writing a biography of his famous namesake, Bill Lewis, a high-school history teacher, nearly loses himself in his attempts to understand one of the great untold stories in American history the adventures and subsequent suicide of Meriwether Lewis. Even as he struggles to illuminate that strange and exuberant time and falls under the spell of the elusively seductive persona of Capt. Lewis, Bill finds himself fighting his own personal crisis,...

Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent Rose and her brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project.

"Catherine Whitfield is sure that she will never again be able to trust anyone in the medical profession after the town doctor's excessive bleeding treatments killed her mother. Despite her loneliness and her broken heart, she carries bravely on as Cimarron Creek's dutiful schoolteacher, resigned to a life without love or family, a life where dreams rarely come true. Austin Goddard is a newcomer to Cimarron Creek. Posing as a rancher, he fled to Texas...

Newbery Medalist and New York Times bestselling author Erin Entrada Kelly transports readers to 1986 and introduces them to the unforgettable Cash, Fitch, and Bird Nelson Thomas in this pitch-perfect middle grade novel about family, friendship, science, and exploration. This acclaimed Newbery Honor Book is a great choice for readers of Kate DiCamillo, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Rebecca Stead. Cash, Fitch, and Bird Nelson Thomas are three siblings in...

Belle Teal Harper's entrance into fifth-grade in the early 1960s brings many changes and challenges as her Gran's memory begins to slip, her mom spends long hours away at work, and her class gets two new students, including an African-American boy who is caught in the middle of the fight over desegregation.

Everything's changing for Sarah Beth Willis. After Robin's tragic accident, everyone seems different somehow. Days on the farm aren't the same, and the simple fun of riding a bike or playing outside can be scary. And now, Sarah will be attending a different school.There's talk in town about the new sixth-grade teacher at Shady Creek School. Word is spreading quickly - Mrs. Smyre is like no other teacher anyone has ever seen around these parts....

Middle-school history teacher Rush Revere takes his students back in time to eighteenth-century Boston to experience the start of the American Revolution as it happens.

"Thirty miles off the coast of San Francisco lie the Farallon Islands, known to sailors as the Devil's Teeth. Despite their fearsome reputation, their remote nature appeals to young Lucy Riley, who in 1859 seeks a new start as a teacher to the lighthouse keepers' children. But Lucy brings treacherous secrets with her, including a name that isn't hers and a past she can't escape. On the island she meets Will Sisson, a mysterious man who seems to recognize...

Following her father's death from a disease that swept through her Nebraska town in 1881, teenaged Sarah Jane must find work to support herself and records in her diary her experiences as a young school teacher.