teacher's funeral: a comedy in three parts, The

Summary: In rural Indiana in 1904, fifteen-year-old Russell's dreams of quitting school and joining a wheat threshing crew are disrupted when his older sister takes over the teaching at his one-room schoolhouse after mean, old Myrt Arbuckle "hauls off and dies." "If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year for it," begins Richard Peck's latest novel, a book full of his signature wit and sass. Russell Culver is fifteen in 1904, and he's raring to leave his tiny Indiana farm town for the endless sky of the Dakotas. To him, school has been nothing but a chain holding him back from his dreams. Maybe now that his teacher has passed on, they'll shut the school down entirely and leave him free to roam. No such luck. Russell has a particularly eventful season of schooling ahead of him, led by a teacher he never could have predicted--perhaps the only teacher equipped to control the likes of him: his sister Tansy. Despite stolen supplies, a privy fire, and more than any classroom's share of snakes, Tansy will manage to keep that school alive and maybe, just maybe, set her brother on a new, wiser course. As he did in A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder , Richard Peck creates a whole world of folksy, one-of-a-kind characters here--the enviable and the laughable, the adorably meek and the deliciously terrifying. There will be no forgetting Russell, Tansy, and all the rest who populate this hilarious, shrewd, and thoroughly enchanting novel.

Notes: Kissing summer good-bye: August -- Best boys in the world -- Me and Lloyd and Charlie Parr -- Flowers for Miss Myrt -- Mess of bad puppies -- First such mishap of the twentieth century -- Droning of locusts, a mourning of doves -- Jailhouse of school: Called to the trough of knowledge -- One lucky boy -- Stony Lonesome -- Trouble on the way -- Another old gal in the ditch -- Only really perfect thing in the world -- Fall of the year: One serious suitor -- Fatal Friday -- Two miracles and a mercy -- Grown and flown.