Count along with twenty young students from nineteen different homes as they get ready for their first day of kindergarten. Alarm clocks go off and students all over town wake up and get ready for their big day. Some feel eager, others are nervous, and a few are even grumpy! But they all get dressed, eat breakfast, pack backpacks, and make their way to school, where they will meet their new teacher and become a wonderful new class. Boni Ashburn’s snappy rhyming text and Kimberly Gee’s adorable and diverse group of children make this a great pick for little ones getting ready for their first day of school.

From world-renowned author Erich Segal comes a powerful and moving saga of five extraordinary members of the Harvard class of 1958 and the women with whom their lives are intertwined. Five lives, five love stories: Danny Rossi, the musical prodigy, risks it all for Harvard, even a break with his domineering father. Yet his real problems are too much fame too soon—and too many women. Ted Lambros spends his four years as a commuter, an outsider. He is obsessed by his desire to climb to the top of the Harvard academic ladder, heedless of what it will cost him in personal terms. Jason Gilbert, the Golden Boy—handsome, charismatic, a brilliant athlete—learns at Harvard that he cannot ignore his Jewish background. Only in tragedy will he find his true identity. George Keller, a refugee from Communist Hungary, comes to Harvard with the barest knowledge of English. But with ruthless determination, he masters not only the language but the power structure of his new country. Andrew Eliot is haunted by three centuries of Harvard ancestors who cast giant shadows on his confidence. It is not until the sad and startling events of the reunion that he learns his value as a man. Their explosive story begins in a time of innocence and spans a turbulent quarter century, culminating in their dramatic twenty-five year reunion at which they confront their classmates—and the balance sheet of their own lives. Always at the center; amid the passion, laughter, and glory, stands Harvard—the symbol of who they are and who they will be. They were a generation who made the rules—then broke them—whose glittering successes, heartfelt tragedies, and unbridled ambitions would stun the world. Praise for The Class “Erich Segal’s best.”—Pittsburgh Press “First class entertainment.”—Cosmopolitan “An absorbing page-turner.”—Publishers Weekly “A panoramic saga.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

Winner of the Prix France Culture/Télérama prize, The Class explores timely issues of race, class, identity, colonial history, immigration, and education, "suspend[ing] judgment and liberat[ing] the raw words of kids in a deconsecrated classroom" (Le Monde). The novel's eponymous film version, directed by Laurent Cantet, starring author Bégaudeau as himself, won the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

“A complex, thought-provoking, and entertaining view of middle school.” —Publishers Weekly Twenty kids. Twenty points of view. One rambunctious, brilliantly conceived novel that corrals the seeming chaos (c’mon, TWENTY points of view!) into one effervescent story. Sixth grade is a MOST confusing time. Best friends aren’t friends anymore. Worst enemies suddenly want to be partners in crime. And classmates you thought you knew have all sorts of surprising stuff going on. The kids in Mrs. Herrera’s class are dealing with all this and more—specifically: 1. There’s a new girl who just seems to be spying on them all and scribbling things in a notebook. Maybe she IS a spy? 2. Someone is stealing Mrs. Herrera’s most treasured items. 3. Their old classmate, Sam, keeps showing up and no one knows why…until they do. Which leads to a fourth problem. But we can’t tell you about that yet. The twenty kids in Mrs. Herrera’s classroom can, though, and they do. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

In the midst of racial strife, one young man showed courage and empathy. It took forty years for the others to join him… Being a student at Americus High School was the worst experience of Greg Wittkamper's life. Greg came from a nearby Christian commune, Koinonia, whose members devoutly and publicly supported racial equality. When he refused to insult and attack his school's first black students in 1964, Greg was mistreated as badly as they were: harassed and bullied and beaten. In the summer after his senior year, as racial strife in Americus—and the nation—reached its peak, Greg left Georgia. Forty-one years later, a dozen former classmates wrote letters to Greg, asking his forgiveness and inviting him to return for a class reunion. Their words opened a vein of painful memory and unresolved emotion, and set him on a journey that would prove healing and saddening. The Class of '65 is more than a heartbreaking story from the segregated South. It is also about four of Greg's classmates—David Morgan, Joseph Logan, Deanie Dudley, and Celia Harvey—who came to reconsider the attitudes they grew up with. How did they change? Why, half a lifetime later, did reaching out to the most despised boy in school matter to them? This noble book reminds us that while ordinary people may acquiesce to oppression, we all have the capacity to alter our outlook and redeem ourselves.