FREE: MANIAC MAGEE by JERRY SPINELLI, winner of the 1991 Newberry Medal

The listing, MANIAC MAGEE by JERRY SPINELLI, winner of the 1991 Newberry Medal has ended.

Paperback book. 184 pages, IFBN 0-316-80906-3
For those of you who haven't already had the pleasure, let us introduce you to this wonderful book. It's about prejudice and love and home and baseball and fear and understanding. It's about Jeffrey Lionel Magee, sometimes known as Maniac Magee, and about the people of the fictional town of Two Mills.

Jeffrey's parents were killed in a trolley accident when he was three and he spent the next eight years in the bizarre household of his Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan, who hated each other but refused to divorce and so lived in the same house without speaking to each other, using Jeffrey as their go-between. In a scene that will remind some of you of John Irving's adult novel, Prayer for Owen Meany, Jeffrey screams at them from the middle of a school concert, "Talk to each other!" and then runs away.

That's the beginning of his running and his search for a real home. He ends up in the town of Two Mills, two hundred miles away from his aunt and uncle. Two Mills is a town divided by race into East and West End. There Jeffrey becomes "Maniac Magee", the subject of legends that have lasted ever since. In his search for a place to belong, he eventually succeeds to some degree in uniting the town by forcing at least some of the Blacks and Whites to know each other.

There's enough to work with in this novel to take up a whole school year, but first of all, the novel is fun. There is much to laugh out loud about before you cry and then you think about what Spinelli is telling us in this book which is understandable, at least on one level, by children as young as third graders. It won the Newbery Medal the year it came out.

You won't need most of these suggestions for things to talk about. The book is so rich and so well written that after reading it you'll need to talk about it and so will the kids.
CONDITION- very good almost like-new