Wild West: A Nonfiction Companion to Magic Tree House #10: Ghost Town at Sundown

by Mary Pope Osborne, Natalie Pope Boyce, Isidre Mones (Illustrator)

Overview

For aspiring writer Rachel Ingles finding a dead body was not how she planned on celebrating her promotion. Rachel Ingles is an intelligent, easily bored, aspiring writer who runs into trouble at every temp job she takes. Her next assignment at an ATM company is where she lands in the middle of murder, money scams and an ex-cop that she'd rather strangle than enlist to her aid. However, Josh Tanner, her sexy, dynamic boss forces Rachel on a collision course with that same crude, unkempt, callous, drunken ex-cop. He is seething with anger towards her, yet Rachel can't shake him...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101936450
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	01/02/2018
Series:	Magic Tree House Fact Tracker Series
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	81,810
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 5.10(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	7 - 10 Years

About the Author

Ever since 1992, Mary Pope Osborne has been thrilling kids everywhere with her delightfully exciting Magic Tree House series. The globetrotting escapades of time travelers Jack and Annie are brimming with adventure and magic (not to mention some subtly placed lessons on history and geography). With a life like Osborne's, it's only natural that she would be capable of bringing such wondrous stories to life.

Osborne was brought up in a military family, and her parents' work led to a lifestyle marked by constant change. "By the time I was 15," she says on randomhouse.com, "I had lived in Oklahoma, Austria, Florida, and four different army posts in Virginia and North Carolina." While many kids would probably feel disoriented by such constant change, Osborne wouldn't have had it any other way. "Moving was never traumatic for me, but staying in one place was. When my dad finally retired to a small town in North Carolina, I nearly went crazy with boredom. I craved the adventure and changing scenery of our military life."

And adventure is exactly what Osborne got! After college, she embarked on a series of daring treks across the globe that would surely give Jack and Annie a run for their money. "For a while I camped in a cave on the island of Crete," she said. "Then I joined up with a small band of European young people heading to 'The East.' We traveled through 11 Asian countries and nearly lost our lives, first in an earthquake in northern Afghanistan and then in a riot in Kabul."

Following an illness she contracted in Katmandu, Osborne returned home to the U.S. trying her hand at a vast variety of jobs: window dresser, medical assistant, Russian travel consultant, waitress, bartender, and an assistant editor at a children's magazine. Although Osborne had unconsciously moved closer toward her ultimate career, she says that her first attempts at writing seemed to come without warning. "One day, out of the blue, I began writing a story about an 11-year-old girl in the South," she recalls. "The girl was a lot like me, and many of the incidents in the story were similar to happenings in my childhood...it became a young adult novel called Run, Run Fast as You Can. Finally, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up."

She sure did! Since then, Osborne has penned a slew of stories, including picture books, chapter books, middle-grade biographies, and young adult novels; but she is indisputably best known for her wonderful Magic Tree House books, a happy hodge-podge of history and mystery with a time travel theme kids find irresistible. No doubt inspired by Osborne's own highly adventurous life, these exiting expeditions have attracted droves of children and pleased educators by combining compulsively readable storytelling with useful facts about geography and history.

As was written of the series in Children's Literature, "Mary Pope Osborne provides nicely paced excitement for young readers, and there's just enough information mixed in so that children will take away some historical fact along with a sense of accomplishment at having completed a chapter book." As much as Osborne has certainly pleased her readers (not to mention their parents and teachers), perhaps no one is quite as pleased as she. "I'm one of those very lucky people who absolutely loves what they do for a living," she explained. "There is no career better suited to my eccentricities, strengths, and passions than that of a children's book author."

Hometown:

Goshen, Connecticut

Date of Birth:

May 20, 1949

Place of Birth:

Fort Sill, Oklahoma

Education:

B.A., University of North Carolina

Website:

http://www.marypopeosborne.com