Back to School Sale!

School's starting up again, and we moms are back to the old PTA work, with all the frustrations and fun that entails. Just to keep everyone smiling, and to remind us that things could always be worst, I'm offering a special deal on the first Pismawallops PTA mystery!

From today through Sept. 10, buy  Death By Ice Cream for just $2.99 at the Kindle store. And because I firmly believe in supporting other platforms, use coupon code PJ97S to get the same price from Smashwords, which sells all formats, including Kindle, Kobo and Nook.

Pismawallops Island is a quiet place where nothing much happens, even at the High School.  That’s how JJ MacGregor likes it.  So when a new member of the PTA threatens to disrupt the even tenor of life in the middle of Puget Sound, JJ insists they have to take a firm stand against her.  But when Letitia Lemoine shows up very dead in the freezer where there should have been 30 boxes of ice cream bars, JJ worries that someone might have taken her command too seriously.  Not the sort to sit back while other people solve her problems, JJ just can’t help asking a few questions.  But someone wants her to stop—and an acerbic sense of humor, insatiable curiosity, and carefully hidden dedication to duty lead her into more trouble than she knows how to handle.

Welcome to the Pismawallops PTA--a fun and exciting new mystery series from the author of The Ninja Librarian.

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Because you can never have too much ice cream.

Kid LIt Blog Hop: Back to School!

School starts today in our district (for the little kids; the high school my boys attend started a week ago, which is evil).  So I was thinking about a list of the best books about school.  Or at least a list of books I like which are all or in part about school.

A lot of kids' books of course center around life at school.  But as a kid I had a particularly soft spot for books about boarding school.  Probably a kind of horrified fascination, since I couldn't imagine being sent away from home that way!  (As a parent, despite sundry temptations to leave the boys on the side of the road somewhere, I still can't imagine boarding school as a realistic option).

Of course, the ultimate boarding school story is Harry Potter.  But I'm reaching back to some others I loved.

Starting way back:

 

I can't find a match for the cover of my copy, which was given to my grandmother for Christmas in 1910.

This one is if anything even more outdated, and not precisely boarding school, but a huge childhood favorite of mine:

 

 Madeleine L'Engle wrote some stories of truly miserable boarding schools:

 

And school features largely in such other favorites as Little Town on the Prairie, and even A Wizard of Earthsea.

And, because this is my blog and I can, I will say that 

and   are actually school stories in many ways.