Books published by Apprentice House

The school year is just beginning, and twelve-year-old Kelsey Baker has a lot on her mind. September brings opportunities for new friendships, beginning when Allie Anderson moves in next door. The girls bond over Allie's interest in learning about Kelsey's Deafness, as well as their shared love of running. They quickly become friends and are excited to join their school's cross country team together. But Kelsey soon wonders whether she has to pretend to be someone she isn't in order to be a part of the team. Plus, balancing her old friendships with her new ones and dealing with less-than-kind classmates are both much more difficult than she thought. She wonders where she fits in and whether her family and friends really understand her. Kelsey needs to bring her different worlds together, but how? This year will test her courage, patience, and confidence, but, despite it all, Kelsey's shining positivity and determination will lead her to realize who she truly is: a girl of many colors.

Chilling and mysterious folklore comes to life in this supernatural thriller about a writer investigating ghost legend in a town in denial. Stakes are raised when the writer protagonist discovers a Native American burial ground under an Eastern Shore jail and begins hallucinating black shapes and undulating snakes. This poltergeist fable is based upon the spirit myth of Dorchester County as well as Lynne's personal ghost narrative. Like a parable with a little bit of dangerous truth, the ghost stories are all genuine.

Journalist Brian Wendell Morton has spent more than eight years documenting Washington, D.C.'s Oz-like world in weekly columns for Baltimore's City Paper titled, "Political Animal." Eric Engberg of CBS News once said, "Washington is ten square miles, surrounded by reality." Morton points out the surreality of a city where a popular president was almost hounded out of office for a consensual sex act, yet another president whose popularity ratings hover at historic lows can't be held accountable for a war waged under false pretenses, torture, malfeasance, and the destruction of an entire American city. Political Animal points out the discrepancy between reality and the skewed views of the political media who cover it. Some would argue that this media would fiddle while Rome burned if it meant rising stock prices and better ratings. From the early 1990s through the pages of last week's headlines, Morton takes a fearless and provocative stroll through the issues of politics, race, the media, guns, drugs, religion, and more.

In Tonight at Six, veteran journalist Michael Olesker paints an intimate, behind-the-scenes picture of local television news as few have ever seen it. He describes the long slide of a medium that was once assumed to be the golden future of American journalism, but is now widely considered an afterthought for viewers seeking serious news coverage.In his two decades as a nightly on-air commentator at Baltimore's WJZ-TV, Olesker watched as the station tumbled from pre-eminence as one of the country's top-rated local affiliates-where the on-air news personalities included the two top-ranked anchors in the country, plus a young woman named Oprah Winfrey-to inglorious runner-up in its own market.Tonight at Six offers a personal look at many of those public news personalities. But it's also a story about the decline of all TV news: how commercial considerations, short-sighted management, and the constant pressure of ratings forced the dumbing-down of local news programs around the country. It's the true story of how television stations purporting to cover the stories of huge metropolitan areas-their governors, mayors, city and county councils, school systems, police, criminal courts, neighborhoods, and more-quietly attempt this with no more than a handful of reporters.How do they do it? As Olesker explains, they don't."While this account eviscerates three Baltimore network affiliates, the sad truth is that they are no worse-and no better-than all local TV news operations. Olesker paints a high-definition picture of the façade beneath the façade."Ira R. AllenFormer UPI Reporter and White House Correspondent