Showing results by author "Randall Platt" in All Categories

By her 14th birthday, Babe Killingsworth measures six-feet-nine-inches and weighs 342 pounds. In 1896, what other options does a giant have but to join a carnival? Her only real talent is handling animals. The cheap outfit her feckless father sells her off to offers critters galore; an escape from Neal, Idaho; and a bit of fame. It also opens the doorway to exploitation and neglect. Enter Carlotta Jones, billed as the world’s smallest girl, whose elephant act leaves much to be desired. At 30 inches tall, Carlotta is beautiful, spoiled, demanding, and has very little talent.

Cordelia Lu Hankins is the half Caucasian, half Chinese - and all albino. She has grown up in a remote lumber town with her distant father and a giant stepmother nicknamed Babe (after Paul Bunyan's blue ox), convinced she is ugly. Then, in the summer of 1918, when she is fourteen, she falls in love with the dashing Squirl. One day they meet on the mountain and Cordy receives her first kiss, as well as a wild ride down a log flume that gets Squirl fired.

In 1944, while much of the world is at war, 14-year-old Teddy wages her own war against herself, her brother, and her perfect, and perfectly despised, mother. Forced to spend the summer at the beach with a grandmother she'd never met, Teddy faces her enemies with arrogance and anger. But as the summer unfolds, she begins learning the answers to some painful questions about the past that destroyed her family and left her mother and grandmother bitterly divided.

When the owner of Oregon's largest cattle ranch - the Four Arrows - is shot by his horse in a freak accident, Royal Leckner suddenly finds himself charged with teaching the owner's retarded son to take over management of the ranch. The son, Leviticus Perrault, comes as part of an unmatched set, which includes Toofer, a man split between bickering Confederate and Union personalities; Tommy Two Hearts, half-white, half-Indian, and half-paralyzed; and Lou(ella), an idiot savant.

In this coming-of-age novel set in 1944, Ian McKenzie is a bright 15-year-old street kid who's been sent to a Washington State summer camp to be straightened out. Andy Ackerman, the counselor assigned to the camp's charity cases, is a young man fresh from the war in the Pacific, tough, angry, but understanding. Through Ackerman's tough love and the sharing of a strenuous task, Ian gains pride and a sense of honor.

It seems that the FDR writer is back wanting more Fe-As-Ko stories from cowpoke Royal Leckner. This time it's 1897, Royal and E.M. have been married about four years. And so have Leviticus and Lou(ella) Perrault, owners of the Four Arrows ranch. Royal is still foreman of the ranch and caretaker of its owner. As he reminds us, Leviticus and Lou(ella) Perrault are "short a hat size," but "nice and honest, which is better than smart and fox-like any day." It's time to take the cattle to Portland for the annual sale, and Royal is bringing Leviticus along to teach him how "to sign on the dotted line."

In The Royalscope Fe-As-Ko, Northwest cattle rancher Royal Leckner finds himself in the middle of another fe-as-ko, this time in 1915 Hollywood. Dreams of stardom for her daughter, Elsie, and for herself entice Royal's wife, E.M., to buy a silent film company. She quickly renames it Royalscope Productions in order to convince her fuming husband it's a gift.