Inside Cover

Poor Duncan just wants to color.  But when he opens his box of crayons, he finds only letter, all saying the same thing: We Quit!

Beige is tired of playing second fiddle to Brown.  Blue needs a break from coloring all that water, while Pink just wants to be used.  Green has no complaints, but Orange and Yellow are no longer speaking to each other.  What is Duncan to do?

From Mrs. Yost

Though the book can be classified as “a little kid book,” it is very entertaining and witty.  It’s well worth the five to ten minutes you’ll need to finish this book.

From the Back Cover

For every girl with an idependent spirit and a nose for trouble, here is the no-boys-allowed guide to adventure.

From the Index (a few chapter excerpts)

From Mrs. Yost

Thanks to this book I now have a reference for Robert’s Rules and words to campfire songs long forgotten.  However, page 57 still a work in process.

From the Back Cover

Recapture Sunday afternoon and long summer days.  The perfect book for every boy from eight to eighty.

From the Index (a few chapter excerpts)

From Mrs. Yost

Thanks to this book, I now now the rules to Rugby and have improved my rock skipping ability.

From the Book Flap

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss dares to say that, with our system of punctuation patently endangered, it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them for the wonderful and necessary things they are.  If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it.  “Sticklers unite” is her rallying cry.  “You will have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion – and arguably you didn’t have much of that to begin with.”

This book is for people who love punctuation and get upset about it.  From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to Sir Roger Casement “hanged on a comma”; from George Orwell shunning the semicolon to Peter Cook saying Nevil Shute’s three dots made him feel “all funny”, this book makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

An Excerpt

A Panda walks into a cafe.  He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit.  The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda.  Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China.  Eats, shoots and leaves.”

So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.  This is a zero tolerance guide.

Note from the teacher: There are two versions of this book.  You may read the  British English edition or the American English edition.  I used the British version here.  Please note that punctuation marks like the commas are placed inside the quotation marks in American English.

Back Cover

The heartbreak, love and anxieties of all parents of a handicapped child are simply and movingly expressed in this story of a family’s desperate fight to teach their deaf daughter to speak so she will be considered ‘normal’.  The result is a moving story of how a small deaf girl breaks the chains of ignorance and prejudice that have held her mute for five years–to discover the worlds she cannot hear and to teacher her family what love and being normal really means

Sample Passage

The previous summer the John Tracy correspondence course had been suggesting other ways to prepare Lynn to use her voice.  We learned that language was not simply words, but words spoken in the rhythm of sentences.  Words spoken with punctuation and stress.  And so we began to teach Lynn the rhythm of speech even without the sound of speech.