Terror At Bottle Creek

In this gritty, realistic wilderness adventure, thirteen-year-old Cort is caught in a battle against a Gulf Coast hurricane. Cort's father is a local expert on hunting and swamp lore in lower Alabama who has been teaching his son everything he knows. But when a deadly Category 3 storm makes landfall, Cort must unexpectedly put his all skills-and bravery-to the test. One catastrophe seems to lead to another, leaving Cort and two neighbor girls to face the storm as best they can. Amid miles of storm-thrashed wetlands filled with dangerous, desperate wild animals, it's up to Cort to win-or lose-the fight for their lives. This title has Common Core connections.

In this compelling, action-packed book, Watt Key gives us the thrilling coming-of-age story of the unique and extremely appealing Alabama Moon, the basis for the film of the same name starring Jimmy Bennett and John Goodman. For as long as ten-year-old Moon can remember, he has lived out in the forest in a shelter with his father. They keep to themselves, their only contact with other human beings an occasional trip to the nearest general store. When Moon's father dies, Moon follows his father's last instructions: to travel to Alaska to find others like themselves. But Moon is soon caught and entangled in a world he doesn't know or understand; he's become property of the government he has been avoiding all his life. As the spirited and resourceful Moon encounters constables, jails, institutions, lawyers, true friends, and true enemies, he adapts his wilderness survival skills and learns to survive in the outside world, and even, perhaps, make his home there. This title has Common Core connections. Alabama Moon is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

When a dive off the coast of Alabama goes horribly wrong, 12-year-old Julie and one of her father's scuba clients struggle to survive after reaching an abandoned oil rig.

A mysterious stranger arrives at a boy's rundown Alabama farm home, just as a dangerous situation is unfolding for the twelve-year-old and his widowed mother.

"The son of a Mississippi policeman finds a boy living in hiding in the wilderness and tries to help him without giving away his secret"--

A charming, humorous, and colorful coming of age memoir Bay Boy is a collection of essays by award-winning young adult author Watt Key that chronicles his boyhood in Point Clear, Alabama. During his childhood, Point Clear was not the tony enclave of today with its spas, art galleries, and multi-million-dollar waterfront properties. Rather, it was a sleepy resort community, practically deserted in the winter, with a considerable population of working-class residents. As Key writes in his introduction, “Life in Point Clear is really about being outside. . . . I have never found a place so perfectly suited to exercise a young boy’s imagination.” And so Key filled his hours collecting driftwood to make forts, scooting around the bay in a sturdy Stauter-Built boat, and doing art and writing stories when it rained. There is no literary artifice in these pages. The tone here is simple and direct, punctuated by laugh-out-loud moments. Key writes about Gulf Coast traditions including Mardi Gras, shrimping, fishing, dove hunting, hurricanes, jubilees, and camping out. These stories are full of colorful characters—Nasty Bill Dickson, a curmudgeonly tow-truck driver; I’llNeeda, a middle-aged homeless woman encamped in a shack across the road; and the Ghost of Zundel’s Wharf, “the restless soul of a long-dead construction worker.” The stories are illustrated by charming and evocative artwork by the author’s younger brother Murray Key.

Stories of living in Alabama.

Eleven-year-old Edie Jasmine Snow has one "perfect" thirteen-year-old sister, two loving parents, a cat named Dusty, a grandmother she suspects is a witch, and a grandfather who insists on calling her Albert. Framed by family summer vacations at the lake, All-Season Edie follows Edie through a tumultuous year in which her beloved grandfather becomes ill. In the face of family tragedy, Edie tries to practice witchcraft, learns to dance the flamenco, meets the Greek god Zeus doing his Christmas shopping at the mall, ruins the most important party of her sister's life and realizes that her family is both completely strange and absolutely normal.

The story of of the orphan boy Moon, begun in Watt Key's award-winning Alabama Moon, continues with Dirt Road Home After his recapture, gutsy 14-year-old Hal Mitchell is sentenced to live at Hellenweiler, an institution that is more like a jail than the boys' home it's supposed to be. Hal could walk out in just a few months if he keeps out of trouble. But in a place like Hellenweiler, the more he tries to avoid the gangs and their violence, the stronger Hal's fellow inmates try to make him fail. This title has Common Core connections. "Key does a fabulous job of keeping his readers involved in the story and vested in the characters. Even reluctant readers will most likely find this one hard to put down." -- VOYA

Bernard Krigstein began his career as an unremarkable journeyman cartoonist during the 1940s and finished it as a respected fine artist and illustrator ― but comics historians know him for his explosively creative 1950s, during which he applied all the craft, intelligence and ambition of a burgeoning “serious” artist to his comics work, with results that remain stunning to this day. Krigstein’s legend rests mostly on the 30 or so stories he created for the EC Comics, but dozens of stories drawn for other, lesser publishers such as Rae Herman, Hillman, and Atlas (which would become Marvel) showcase his skills and radical reinterpretation of the comics page, in particular his groundbreaking slicing and dicing of time lapses through a series of narrow, nearly animated panels. Greg Sadowski, who has previously written and designed a Harvey Award-winning biography of Krigstein, has assembled the very best of Krigstein’s comics work, starting with his earliest creative rumblings, through his glory days at EC, to his final, even more brilliantly radical stories for Atlas Comics ― running through every genre popular at the time, be it horror, science fiction, war, western, or romance (but no super-heroes).