{"product_id":"ellray-jakes-rocks-the-holidays-isbn-9780147512512","title":"EllRay Jakes Rocks the Holidays!","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe small kid with big problems returns in the seventh book of this beloved series!\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIt’s almost Christmas and school is going great for EllRay. He’s “blending in” just the way he likes. So when his father tells him he should be proud to be part of the African-American “community,” EllRay isn’t so sure he wants to call attention to his differences. After all, he’s only one of two boys in his class with brown skin. And then, totally by accident, he insults the other boy—one of his best friends—and all at once EllRay’s back to being the center of attention. And not exactly for good reasons.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWith Sally Warner’s trademark sense of humor and spot-on dialogue, EllRay confronts questions about race and how it impacts both himself and everyone around him.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Kids of all stripes will identify with EllRay and his unwittingly hilarious antics.”—Booklist\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Junior Library Guild selection\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Scholastic Book Club selection\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Texas Bluebonnet Award Winner 2012-13\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003ePRAISE FOR THE ELLRAY JAKES SERIES:\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Warner is a dead-on observer of playground politics, and has a great ear for dialogue.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cu\u003eSchool Library Journal\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Ideal for reluctant readers.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cu\u003eBooklist\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Young readers can identify with EllRay, who is neither a bad seed nor a goody-two-shoes; he and his sense of humor are just right.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cu\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Junior Library Guild selection\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Scholastic Book Club selection\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Texas Bluebonnet Award Winner 2012-13\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Sally Warner (www.sallywarner.com) has published more than twenty novels for young readers, including the Emma and EllRay Jakes series. She lives in Altadena, California with her husband and their not-so-miniature dachshund, Rocky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBrian Biggs (www.mrbiggs.com) lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eOTHER BOOKS ABOUT ELLRAY JAKES\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eEllRay Jakes Is Not a Chicken!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eEllRay Jakes Is a Rock Star!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eEllRay Jakes Walks the Plank!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eEllRay Jakes the Dragon Slayer!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eEllRay Jakes and the Beanstalk\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eEllRay Jakes is Magic!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003e1\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRAINY SATURDAY\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“This rain is wrecking my weekend,” I tell Mom. I am staring out the kitchen window after a TV-and-cereal breakfast. We have all the lights on, it’s so dark outside.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMy dad and I usually do chores together on Saturday mornings. We eat a secret doughnut, too. But he’s in sunny Arizona, looking at a meteorite. He’s a rock scientist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe way I learned it, it’s called a \u003ci\u003emeteoroid\u003c\/i\u003e when it whizzes through space. That same space rock is a \u003ci\u003emeteor\u003c\/i\u003e—or shooting star—when it enters Earth’s atmosphere and starts to burn up. And whatever is left is called a \u003ci\u003emeteorite\u003c\/i\u003e once it’s on the ground.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou’re welcome.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI memorized all that, and I \u003ci\u003estill\u003c\/i\u003e didn’t get to go to Arizona! My dad’s giving a lecture at a university in Phoenix on Monday, that’s why.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The rain’s not wrecking your \u003ci\u003ewhole\u003c\/i\u003e weekend,” Mom reminds me, wiping her hands on the clean kitchen towel she throws over her shoulder. “Corey’s spending the night with us, remember? He’ll be here at five. I’m making chili dogs.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Oh, yeah,” I say, smiling. Good old freckle-face Corey Robinson! One of my two best friends in the third grade at Oak Glen Primary School. And chili dogs!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I get to have \u003ci\u003enobody\u003c\/i\u003e,” Alfie says, kicking the leg of our kitchen table.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlfie is my little sister. She’s four. She is kind of a golden color. But she can cloud up fast, especially on a rainy Saturday in December.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“It’s not fair,” Alfie says, giving the kitchen table leg an extra-hard kick. “\u003ci\u003eOw\u003c\/i\u003e,” she cries, rubbing her small red sneaker.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Santa’s watching,” I warn. “Don’t forget, Alfie. He’s making a list.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI am planning on using that sentence a lot this December, to keep Alfie from having too many meltdowns. They wear us out. Once we had to leave a movie before it even started, all because of Raisinets.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlfie is against them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Santa is \u003ci\u003enot\u003c\/i\u003e making a list,” Alfie says. “He doesn’t even have a key to our house! Tell Santa not to make a list, Mom—or I’m calling 9-1-1. Because that’s \u003ci\u003espying.\u003c\/i\u003e”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You’d better \u003ci\u003enot\u003c\/i\u003e call 9-1-1, or you’ll be in big trouble, young lady,” Mom says, opening the freezer door. “You don’t play around with that. Say. I have an idea,” she says, her face hidden for a second byfreezer mist. “How about if we make some of our famous oatmeal cookies for tonight? Corey loves them. And it’ll be fun.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is good news, because Mom’s oatmeal cookies are \u003ci\u003eepic.\u003c\/i\u003e I brought a big batch to school once, and everyone loved them. Ms. Sanchez even took a bunch of them home in her plastic lunch container.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I get to smash the eggs,” Alfie says, her brown eyes sparkling. “Not EllWay.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat’s how she says my name.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You break eggs gently, you don’t \u003ci\u003esmash\u003c\/i\u003e them,” Mom says, putting some sticks of butter in the microwave to soften. “And we’ll put them into a separate bowl first, this time,” she adds.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLast time we made cookies, pieces of eggshell got into the cookie dough. That’s what Mom’s remembering.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMy stomach is growling already!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Mom?” I say, after the first two trays of cookies are in the oven, the timer’s ticking, and a worn-out, cookie-dough-spattered Alfie is curled up on the family room sofa with her blankie, her thumb, and the newest \u003ci\u003eFuzzy Kitties\u003c\/i\u003e DVD.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Hmm?” she says, stirring milk into her coffee.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Why did we move to Oak Glen?” I ask.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Wait, what?” Mom says, surprised.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Oak Glen,” I repeat. “How come we moved here from San Diego?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt happened when I was five years old. I wasn’t exactly paying attention then.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo \u003ci\u003eanything.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI couldn’t ask this question if Dad was here, by the way. He’d prickle up and say, \u003ci\u003e“Why? What happened?”\u003c\/i\u003e See, there aren’t too many families with brown skin in Oak Glen, and I sometimes get the feeling my dad is kind of ready for something to go wrong—even though nothing has. And I think he’s the one who wanted us to move here.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Why?” Mom asks. “What happened?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI sigh. “Nothing \u003ci\u003ehappened\u003c\/i\u003e,” I say. “I was just wondering.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRainy mornings do that to me.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut if Mom takes my rainy morning question in a bad way, she will probably call Dad on his cell. And even if he were busy talking to an actual space alien who’d hitched a ride to Earth on that Arizona meteorite, he would take her call.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd then the uproar would begin—like it did a couple of months ago. That’s when Alfie told Mom and me that she was feeling mad at Suzette Monahan, her friend-enemy at Kreative Learning and Playtime Day Care. And yes, we know they spelled “creative” wrong.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt turns out that Suzette was secretly charging other girls a penny to touch Alfie’s hair, just because it’s different from theirs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWHOA\u003c\/b\u003e. Get back!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike Alfie was part of a petting zoo!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlfie’s moral of the story was that \u003ci\u003eshe\u003c\/i\u003e should have gotten all those pennies. But I told her she had other reasons to be mad about what happened. I said that her hair was her own private property, and those girls should just keep their hands to themselves.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd to tell her teachers if it happened again.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut Mom told Dad, and Dad called the day-care ladies.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter four phone calls and one parents’ meeting, the grownups decided to call the whole thing a misunderstanding. \u003ci\u003e“Everyone moved on,”\u003c\/i\u003e was the way Mom put it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut I think my dad “moves on” slower than other people.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI just don’t want the prickly-dad-uproar thing to happen again, that’s all. You can’t be a blend-in guy—my main goal in life!—if you’re at the center of a tornado.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Why did we move to Oak Glen,” Mom says, repeating my original question. “Well, as you know, we were living in San Diego when you were little, honey,” she says. “And we needed a bigger house after Miss Alfie came along.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I know the living-in-San-Diego part,” I say.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“So we were looking and looking for a new place, but it was a tough search,” Mom continues. “You had just started kindergarten, EllRay. But one weekend, we decided to take a break and head up to Julian, to enjoy some of their apple pie.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJulian is a pretty mountain town with famous apples that is halfway between Oak Glen and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a really cool area our family loves, especially Dad and me. It’s our special place. Anza-Borrego has everything!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e1. An oasis.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e2. Bighorn sheep.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e3. A badlands.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e4. Mud caves.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e5. Lots of earthquake faults, and you can even see where some of them split the rocks.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt’s \u003ci\u003eawesome\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“We stopped in Oak Glen on our way home,” Mom says, remembering. “For gas, I think it was. And your dad really liked the way the place looked, so we popped into a real estate office before heading back down to San Diego.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI try to picture this, but it’s hard to think of dad “popping into” any place. He’s the type of guy who likes to think things through—mostly until you don’t even feel like doing them anymore.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I know, I know,” Mom says, laughing as if she’s just read my mind. “But you have to understand this about your father, EllRay. He can act on impulse when the spirit moves him. And once he realized how much bigger a house and yard we could afford in Oak Glen, and how good the schools were, he was sold.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“But what about you?” I ask, sneaking a look at my mom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I just wanted our search to be over, at that point,” she says, still laughing. “I liked Oak Glen. And your dad promised he wouldn’t mind the commute. He listens to audio books,” she adds, sounding a little jealous.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“But you guys didn’t know anyone here,” I point out.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“We don’t have family in San Diego anymore, either,” Mom reminds me. “Of course, I missed my old hair salon so much that I finally decided to keep driving down to the city for my appointments. And I knew I’d miss my old Balboa Park writing group, but I have to admit that I’ve gotten a lot more actual work done since we moved. Fewer meetings, more writing.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“But didn’t it bother Dad that there weren’t that many brown faces walking down the street? I mean brown \u003ci\u003elegs\u003c\/i\u003e,” I say, trying to correct myself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMom laughs. “As a matter of fact, we happened to \u003ci\u003esee\u003c\/i\u003e a number of brown faces that first day,” she says. “Maybe that gave us a mistaken impression. We were both exhausted at that point, what with your dad’s teaching and you two little rascals to take care of. He just threw himself into the house hunt, and \u003ci\u003eta-da\u003c\/i\u003e! But we’ve all made good friends here,” she adds. “And your dad feels that Oak Glen is becoming more diverse every year.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNot this year’s third grade class at Oak Glen Primary School, I think, frowning.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut that’s okay, because skin color isn’t the reason I choose my friends.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“EllRay?” Mom is saying. “Everything is okay, isn’t it, honey? I mean, you’d tell me if—”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I’d tell you if,” I say, nodding.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBefore I’d tell my dad, I add silently.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Everything’s okay, Mom,” I tell her as the oven timer dings and my stomach starts growling again. “Honest.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd it is. But \u003ci\u003eman\u003c\/i\u003e, I hope she doesn’t mention this conversation to Dad.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003e2\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eBLENDING IN\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Pass me that brown crayon over there, okay?” I say to Corey, who is hunched over his white paper plate, dotting in a few of the three hundred freckles that cover his face. He swims every single day except Thanksgiving and Christmas, so he’s outside all the time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese round paper plates are for our self-portraits. A self-portrait is a picture you make that stars yourself, Ms. Sanchez says. It’s like a selfie that you draw, Emma McGraw explained to Corey and me. She’s a girl in our third grade class.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCorey is frowning, and his tongue is sticking out. He says drawing is hard, and his face shows it. He could swim a mile, easy, but sitting-down stuff knocks him out. “I want the \u003ci\u003edark brown\u003c\/i\u003e crayon,” I add, to make things easier for him.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Puffin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302714691813,"sku":"NP9780147512512","price":6.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780147512512.jpg?v=1767726169","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/ellray-jakes-rocks-the-holidays-isbn-9780147512512","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}