Yellowhawk Author:Jane Stuart Yellowhawk is not a bird of prey. — "Yellowhawk school is a new red brick elementary school sprawled ranch style along the flat river land that curves up to meet the hills behind it. It looks like all the other eastern-Kentucky elementary schools built ten or fifteen years ago because they were all built alike. But it isn't like any other school ... more »because each school is different. The students and teachers are different, and each school makes up a world of its own. Children laugh at different jokes and cry over different hurts. The teachers come in yawning and sleepy after getting their own families off to work or school and when they go inside their classrooms they teach geography or math or history the way they see it or the way they were taught. The things that should make us all alike make us different, and for the first time in my life, I saw how much other people were like me, and yet how different."
These are the musings of Rhoda Miller, in her first year of teaching at Yellowhawk. A young woman whose antennae are as sensitive as her eyes are sharp, Rhoda's thoughts about, and observations of, her fellow teachers, her students, and the townspeople who are the fathers and mothers and aunts and cousins of the schoolchildren shape the novel. You will meet eccentrics and matchmakers; the well-adjusted and the ill-adapted; the wise and the funny. Their similarities and their differences will strike the same sympathetic chords in you they struck in Rhoda Miller, and if a lump rises in your throat now and then, that's because the people who live in Yellowhawk are as different and as much the same as the people you know best.« less