Showing results by author "Rex Ogle" in All Categories

A distinctive new voice: Rex Ogle's story of starting middle school on the free lunch program is timely, heartbreaking, and true. Free Lunch is the story of Rex Ogle's first semester in sixth grade. Rex and his baby brother often went hungry, wore secondhand clothes, and were short of school supplies, and Rex was on his school's free lunch program. Grounded in the immediacy of physical hunger and the humiliation of having to announce it every day in the school lunch line, Rex's is a compelling story of a more profound hunger - that of a child for his parents' love and care.

Sixth grade isn't as great as Rex thought it would be. He's the only kid who hasn't had a growth spurt, and the bullies won't let him forget it. His closest friend is unreliable, at best. And there's a cute girl in his class who he can't stop thinking about. With so much going on, everything is a blur—including Rex's vision! So when he discovers that he needs glasses, and his family can only afford the ugliest pair in the store, any hope Rex had of fitting in goes completely out of focus.

Welcome back to East Emerson, a town chock-full of monsters, in this spooky and hilarious middle grade series about three kids who must unravel centuries of secrets to save the day.

When all the town pets (including Fitz) go missing, Will suspects there’s something sinister going on. So he joins forces with outcast Ivy and super-smart Linus to uncover the ancient secrets of East Emerson. Besides, nothing bad could happen when three sixth graders team up against monsters, magic, myths, and mad science . . . right?

Will Hunter just wants a quiet day in East Emerson. But instead: A bully won’t leave him alone at school. His mom is struggling to make ends meet. Together with friends Ivy and Linus, he’s had to save the town from a pet-napping vampire and a werewolf army. When someone starts raising the dead all over town, it’s up to Will, Ivy, and Linus to unlock the centuries of secrets hiding underground and prevent a terrifying monster from being unleashed. And if they fail, it won’t just mean the end of East Emerson—but the end of the entire world.

On the first day of seventh grade, Rex encounters a bump in the road—a big angry pimple right in the center of his forehead. And this is only the beginning of his problems. What follows is a frustrating battle with stubborn acne, body odor, and other embarrassments of puberty.

Punching Bag is the compelling true story of a high school career defined by poverty and punctuated by outbreaks of domestic abuse. Rex Ogle, who brilliantly mapped his experience of hunger in Free Lunch, here describes his struggle to survive; reflects on his complex, often paradoxical relationship with his passionate, fierce mother; and charts the trajectory of his stepdad’s anger. Hovering over Rex’s story is the talismanic presence of his unborn baby sister.

In his award-winning memoir Free Lunch, Rex Ogle’s abuela features as a source of love and support. In this companion-in-verse, Rex captures and celebrates the powerful presence a woman he could always count on—to give him warm hugs and ear kisses, to teach him precious words in Spanish, to bring him to the library where he could take out as many books as he wanted, and to offer safety when darkness closed in.