The Nerviest Girl in the World by Melissa Wiley (English) Paperback Book

Description: The Nerviest Girl in the World by Melissa Wiley A feisty girl from a family of ranchers lands a job as a daredevil stunt girl in the early days of silent film in this adventurous and funny cross between Wild Hearts Cant Be Broken and Ramona.A feisty girl from a family of ranchers lands a job as a daredevil stunt girl in the early days of silent film in this adventurous and funny cross between Wild Hearts Cant Be Broken and Ramona.Pearl lives on a ranch where her chores include collecting eggs and feeding ornery ostriches. She has three older brothers, who dont coddle her at all. And she knows a thing or two about horses, too.One day, Pearls brothers get cushy jobs doing stunts for this new form of entertainment called "moving pictures." Theyre the Daredevil Donnelly Brothers, a Death-Defying Cowboy Trio. Before she knows it, Pearl has stumbled into being a stunt girl herself--and dreams of becoming a star. The only problem is, her mother has no idea what shes up to. And lets just say she wouldnt be too happy to find out that Pearls been jumping out of burning buildings in her spare time.Filled with action, humor, and heart--not to mention those pesky ostriches--The Nerviest Girl in the World introduces a spunky heroine whose adventures will have kids on the edge of their seats and whose sense of humor will have them laughing until the very last line. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Melissa Wiley is the author of more than a dozen books for kids and teens, including The Prairie Thief, Inch and Roly Make a Wish, Fox and Crow Are Not Friends, and the Martha and Charlotte Little House books. Melissa has been blogging about her familys reading life at Here in the Bonny Glen since 2005. She is @melissawiley on Twitter and @melissawileybooks on Instagram. Review "Lively illustrations mirror the heart, humor, and bravery of Pearl herself. . . . A vivid snapshot of cinemas early days." —Publishers Weekly"A thrill ride excitingly grounded in film history, which is discussed in a fascinating afterword. Best of all is Pearl, a treasure of a protagonist whom readers will love for her candor and bravery as much as for her willingness to admit to her own failings." —Booklist Review Quote "Lively illustrations by Deas mirror the heart, humor, and bravery of Pearl herself.... [A] vivid snapshot of cinemas early days ." -- Publishers Weekly " A thrill ride excitingly grounded in film history , which is discussed in a fascinating afterword. Best of all is Pearl, a treasure of a protagonist whom readers will love for her candor and bravery as much as for her willingness to admit to her own failings." -- Booklist Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 No one in my family had any thought of going into the pictures, not at first. We were ranchers--cattle and sheep, mostly, plus the ostrich enterprise. I heard about moving pictures from kids at school, but I never saw one myself until after Id played parts in half a dozen different reels. By then my brothers were on their way to becoming stars--the Daredevil Donnelly Brothers, a Death-Defying Cowboy Trio. Which of course was a lot of piffle. Death-defying, my eyeball. Theyd been racing horses across the chaparral since before any of them wore shoes--nothing death-defying about doing it on camera. Not compared, say, to leaping out the window of a burning building. But thats jumping ahead. We lived outside Lemon Springs, California, not far from San Diego. Our part of the county is thick with cottonwood, sagebrush, and yucca--heaven for rattlers and the occasional tarantula. My mother taught me to sit a horse at age three because she said it was safer than running around barefoot in snake country. By the time I was nine, I could ride as well as any of my older brothers, and I never had the benefit of trousers and spurs. I just hitched up my skirt and rode astraddle in bare feet. Why, I could ride standing up on the horses back, holding on by my toes and the reins, if the terrain was pretty level--as long as I was well out of range of my mothers line of sight. My big brothers riding prowess is what got them noticed by the Flying Q director. They were working cowboys, and I dont think any of them ever imagined a life in the limelight. Once or twice a year they rode in local rodeos and usually snatched up most of the prizes; that was about as much fame as any Donnelly boy ever expected to experience. And then one day, a month after my eleventh birthday, a portly man in riding boots and breeches strode up to my oldest brother, Bill, after a calf-roping exercise, shook his hand, and said, "Son, howd you like to pull that same stunt in a moving picture?" "Huh?" replied Bill in his typically eloquent fashion. "Names Thornton Corrigan," said the man. He had a confident mustache and a kind of fierce snap in his gaze. "I direct moving pictures for the Flying Q Film Company. Im looking for a couple of good riders for a Western were shooting next week." "Shooting?" echoed Bill. "Whats it pay?" asked my brother Ike, elbowing in. He was sore at Bill for taking first prize. Bill always took first in the roping events, but if there were a prize for getting straight to the point of a discussion, Ike would have taken it every time. Mr. Corrigan didnt bat an eye at Ikes directness. "We pay handsomely for real talent," he answered smoothly. "I need fellas who can ride like the blazes and do some rope tricks on film--real showy stuff, plenty of panache." "On film?" exclaimed Bill. "Like in the pictures?" Moving pictures were so new that I hadnt even seen one yet. I had to put up with hearing about them from kids at school. "Thats right," said Mr. Corrigan. "But we aint actors," chimed in my brother Frank. He was sixteen, with one pitiful mustache hair for each year, more or less. I could see he was mighty impressed with Mr. Corrigans bristle brush. "Im not looking for actors, son," replied Mr. Corrigan. "Ive got actors crawling out of my ears." (I couldnt help but dart a glance at his ears then, even though I knew he was only being poetic. They appeared undisturbed.) "I need real cowboys. I pride myself on the authenticity of my pictures." Au-then-ticity, I repeated silently in my head. It was what my father would call a five-dollar word, and I had no idea what it meant, but I liked it. It sounded like a place Id like to visit. By the end of that conversation, Mr. Corrigan had gotten himself invited to dinner at the ranch. By the end of that dinner, hed talked my father into giving the boys a day off their cattle work to do some rope tricks in front of a Flying Q camera. By the end of the week, all three of my brothers were roped into the motion picture business just as firmly as any calf Bill ever lassoed with his eyes closed, and my father had to advertise for some new ranch hands. Chapter 2 Everyone around here thinks of life in two sections, like a two-reel picture: before Flying Q and after Flying Q. My mother tells me stories about how her family moved from Fletcher, Colorado, to San Diego, California, when she was a little girl, about as old as I was when the studio set up operations in Lemon Springs. She says all her memories are divided into Before The Move and After The Move. I guess itll be the same for me, only its Before The Movies and After The Movies. We stayed put on our same old ranch, and I still have to get up and do my ostrich chores before breakfast, same as ever, but just about everything else in my life is different since Flying Q swooped in. I guess when Im old like my mother, Ill be telling my kids before-and-after stories, too. Assuming I dont break my neck jumping onto a moving train first--or get kicked in the head by an irked ostrich. Our ranch runs mostly to cattle, but we have one big pen beyond the kitchen garden for the ostriches. We raise some for meat and some for eggs, and all of them for their big plumy feathers, which fetch a pretty penny. Mama sells them to a hatmaker in San Diego every year after molting season. We keep six or seven birds at a time, most of em females because we rely on the eggs. One ostrich egg makes a scramble big enough to feed our whole family. Chicken eggs taste a heap better, though. My grandmother says chicken-egg scrambles are for fancy folk who have time to spend all day cracking shells. But I notice it doesnt take her all day to crack chicken eggs when shes making a cake. Youd have to make ten cakes if you wanted to use an ostrich egg. The only catch is that ostriches, unlike chickens, dont lay eggs year-round. Heres what your mornings like when youre the youngest kid in the family, meaning youre the one stuck tending the birds. They arent like other ranch stock--no chummy nuzzles like you get from horses, or placid indifference like cows and sheep. No, ostriches are nasty-tempered she-demons whod as soon crack your skull as look at you. At least, thats what my father says. He wont go near the birds. "Theyre my wifes enterprise," he always says. She grew up ducking kicks from the she-demons, just like me--After The Move, that is. That means she got kind of a late start, compared to me. I started feeding the birds and collecting their eggs when I was six years old. They mostly ignore me now. Ike says Im so gangly and long-legged myself that they just think Im one of em. But I still have to look sharp when I open the gate to their pen or Jezebel will charge me. Shes the meanest she-demon of the bunch. The trick is to fill their food trough first, then unhook the latch to their coop with a big stick poked through the fence, and then, after theyve thundered out to bury their heads in breakfast, I creep around to the pasture gate and open it while theyre occupied. After they eat, they stampede out to pasture and I use my stick to shut the gate behind them. Then I can clean the coop and, in egg season, check for eggs in peace and quiet. Well, quiet at least. Its hard to feel exactly peaceful when youre shoveling fresh ostrich dung. When Im finished, I carry the eggs into the kitchen, where my grandmother takes them over. I get sent to wash up before breakfast. Nobody wants to sit down to a meal next to the girl who cleans the ostrich pen. It all goes in reverse in the evenings, except for the egg-gathering and poo-shoveling parts. Mama still makes me scrub my arms, face, and feet before Im allowed to sit down for dinner. I used to think I must be the cleanest kid in San Diego County. Then I got to know Mary Mason. She bathes as much as I do (more, since her baths are long soaks in a tub instead of hasty scrub-downs with a rough towel like mine), and she doesnt get herself stunk up doing ostrich chores in between. From our ostrich pen you can look east over the valley to Bittercreek and the mountains beyond. The sun shoots over those mountains in the morning right in time to jab my eyeballs with rays when Im tending the birds. It sets over the Pacific Ocean, but were almost twenty miles from the coast and our ranch is too flat for a view. Once, when I was six or seven years old, my father took my brothers and me to the top of Mount Caracol, a smallish mountain a little northeast of town, and we took in the view to the west, past Lemon Springs to San Diego and, beyond that, a glittering stripe of ocean. Papa lifted me onto his shoulders so I could see even farther. I remember how far away everything seemed--the ocean, the tall palm trees, the hills; even my brothers standing beside us seemed a long way down from my perch. From our ranch the westward view is mostly just pastureland and scrub. In the mornings a fresh, clean smell of sage sweeps across the chaparral, and the comfortable sound of cattle drifts across the pastures. Every spring the spiky yucca plants send up tall shoots of big white bell-shaped flowers. Grandma calls them our-Lords-lantern plants. My brother Ike calls them hells bells, because the yucca leaves are sharp as needles and will slice your arm if you get too close, walking by. (But he never calls them that around our grandmother.) Until Mr. Corrigan appeared in our lives, I didnt think much about the world beyond our ranch and Lemon Springs. My world was ostriches and horses, and the rumble of cattle and th Details ISBN0307930432 Author Melissa Wiley Pages 208 Audience Age 8-12 Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 0307930432 ISBN-13 9780307930439 Publication Date 2021-06-22 UK Release Date 2021-06-22 Format Paperback Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Illustrations Black and white Illustrations AU Release Date 2021-06-22 NZ Release Date 2021-06-22 US Release Date 2021-06-22 Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Crown Archetype DEWEY FIC Audience Children / Juvenile We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:132317768;

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