Gloria's Way [Paperback]

Gloria is best friends with Julian and his little brother Huey, and she has as much to say as they do. There's the parrot that ruins the Valentine for her mother; Huey's dog, who needs to be cured of his squirrel obsession; and what happens when classmate Latisha tricks Gloria, Julian, and Huey-but they don't know until it's too late! Fans of Ann Cameron's best-selling chapter books about Julian and Huey will love Gloria, too.

This is where peace begins-in an ordinary neighborhood where children learn to address their problems with the help of wise adults who offer them good counsel while respecting the children enough to let them work out their own solutions . . . . Sparkles with humor. (The Horn Book) I was born and grew up in a small town of about seven thousand people, Rice Lake, Wisconsin. My favorite person was my grandfather, Oscar Lofgren, who taught me Swedish and told me stories. He was a blacksmith and on our land he had a shop where he made things for us out of iron. I loved watching him hammer the hot iron on the anvil and watching the sparks fly. He died when I was six. I think because of my relationship with him, I grew up to be a friendly and warm person.

My dad was a small-town lawyer who handled all kinds of cases--sometimes cases of clients who didn't have any money: one family paid him in eggs that they delivered to his office every Saturday morning. My mother had been a high school English teacher before she married and admired writers tremendously. She used to say thought writing was 'the most difficult job in the world.' When I was in third grade, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I don't think the idea that it was 'the most difficult job in the world' was a help to me!

From the time I was seven till I was ten, my inseparable playmate was a boy named Bradley whom I admired tremendously. My memories of that period of my life inform my stories about Julian. So does my relationship with my father, who was a shlÓ!