Raised in the heart of the ocean, a water elemental princess lives a sheltered existence. Her world is turned upside down when she's betrothed to a fire prince from a rival kingdom. Can a love born from such opposing forces survive? As she navigates a world of fire and passion, she must also uncover a dark secret that threatens both kingdoms. Will her magic be enough to save them? Find out in this captivating tale of love, magic, and destiny.
In 1837, while charting the Amazonian country of Guiana for Great Britain, German naturalist Robert Schomburgk discovered an astounding "vegetable wonder"--a huge water lily whose leaves were five or six feet across and whose flowers were dazzlingly white. In England, a horticultural nation with a mania for gardens and flowers, news of the discovery sparked a race to bring a live specimen back, and to bring it to bloom. In this extraordinary plant, named Victoria regia for the newly crowned queen, the flower-obsessed British had found their beau ideal. In The Flower of Empire, Tatiana Holway tells the story of this magnificent lily, revealing how it touched nearly every aspect of Victorian life, art, and culture. Holway's colorful narrative captures the sensation stirred by Victoria regia in England, particularly the intense race among prominent Britons to be the first to coax the flower to bloom. We meet the great botanists of the age, from the legendary Sir Joseph Banks, to Sir William Jackson Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to the extravagant flower collector the Duke of Devonshire. Perhaps most important was the Duke's remarkable gardener, Joseph Paxton, who rose from garden boy to knight, and whose design of a series of ever-more astonishing glass-houses--one, the Big Stove, had a footprint the size of Grand Central Station--culminated in his design of the architectural wonder of the age, the Crystal Palace. Fittingly, Paxton based his design on a glass-house he had recently built to house Victoria regia. Indeed, the natural ribbing of the lily's leaf inspired the pattern of girders supporting the massive iron-and-glass building. From alligator-laden jungle ponds to the heights of Victorian society, The Flower of Empire unfolds the marvelous odyssey of this wonder of nature in a revealing work of cultural history.
From the author of the "wonderfully ingenious" (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review) novel After the Crash, a thrilling tale of a murder that takes place in Claude Monet's garden and the mystery that surrounds it. Giverny, France. During the day, the town is the home of the famous artist Claude Monet and the gardens where he painted his Water Lilies. But once the tourists have gone, there is a darker side to the peaceful French village. This is the story of thirteen days that begin with one murder and end with another. Jéme Morval, a man whose passion for art was matched only by his passion for women, has been found dead in the stream that runs through the gardens. In his pocket is a postcard of Monet's Water Lilies with the words: Eleven years old. Happy Birthday. Entangled in the mystery are three women: a young painting prodigy, the seductive village schoolteacher, and an old widow who watches over the village from a mill by the stream. All three of them share a secret. But what do they know about the discovery of Jéme Morval's corpse? And what is the connection to the mysterious, rumored painting of Black Water Lilies?
Runa is a young Japanese high school teacher leaving the country to avoid the scandal she has created by sleeping with one of her students. She steals her sister’s passport and boards the ferry to Shanghai. Then, careful to impersonate her sister, she is quiet, docile and discreet... Meanwhile, on the last stretch of a fraught and tiring mission to find a wife, an Englishman also boards the ferry. Rebuffed in Tokyo, Ralph hopes that on the Chinese mainland he will meet a gentle, beautiful girl to return home with. When these two meet, suppressing at first their secrets and obsessions on this long and claustrophobic journey, we enter a desolate, emotional landscape as Runa’s journey begins to turn into a surreal and terrifying nightmare . . .
"In 1928, the former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau published Claude Monet : les nymphéas (The water-lilies), a memoir of his longtime friend. Bruce Michelson has produced a new English translation, presented here with useful notes and illustrations. Michelson's translations of three short essays on art by Clemenceau, originally published by La justice in the late XIX c., are included as appendices"--
A dangerous prophecy threatens Edwardian London... and it begins with a murder. Lily Albright can see the future, and it looks like hell. In an England on the brink of war, Lily is plagued by psychic visions of the cataclysmic destruction of London. An ancient prophecy is coming to fruition, and it starts with the gruesome discovery of a corpse in the sewers. To save her city, Lily must untangle a web of conspiracy and violence. She'll need the help of all of her fellow Charismatics—the men and women who know "the impossible things". That includes the enigmatic Lord Strangford, whose ability to see into the darkest corners of Lily's soul threatens to tear their relationship apart. From the gutters of the Limehouse to the champagne-soaked ballrooms of St. John's Wood, Lily races to expose a plot that could bring the British empire to its knees. But changing fate and preventing an apocalypse will put Lily's charismatic powers to the ultimate test. Jacquelyn Benson continues The London Charismatics with another supernatural historical fantasy full of gothic mystery and occult powers. Pick up The Shadow of Water and return to the arcane streets of Edwardian England.
A guide to the forgotten waterways hidden throughout the five boroughs Beneath the asphalt streets of Manhattan, creeks and streams once flowed freely. The remnants of these once-pristine waterways are all over the Big Apple, hidden in plain sight. Hidden Waters of New York City offers a glimpse at the big city’s forgotten past and ever-changing present, including: Minetta Brook, which ran through today's Greenwich Village Collect Pond in the Financial District, the city's first water source Newtown Creek, separating Brooklyn and Queens Bronx River, still a hotspot for urban canoeing and hiking Filled with eye-opening historical anecdotes and walking tours of all five boroughs, this is a side of New York City you’ve never seen.
A Mildred L. Batchelder Honor Book and an ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book, The Lily Pond continues the story of two Jewish sisters who left Austria during WWII/Holocaust and found refuge in Sweden. A year after Stephie Steiner and her younger sister, Nellie, left Nazi-occupied Vienna, Stephie has finally adapted to life on the rugged Swedish island where her she now lives. But more change awaits Stephie: her foster parents have allowed her to enroll in school on the mainland, in Goteberg. Stephie is eager to go. Not only will she be pursuing her studies, she'll be living in a cultured city again--under the same roof as Sven, the son of the lodgers who rented her foster parents' cottage for the summer. Five years her senior, Sven dazzles Stephie with his charm, his talk of equality, and his anti-Hitler sentiments. Stephie can't help herself--she's falling in love. As she navigates a sea of new emotions, she also grapples with what it means to be beholden to others, with her constant worry about what her parents are enduring back in Vienna, and with the menacing spread of Nazi idealogy, even in Sweden. In these troubled times, her true friends, Stephie discovers, are the ones she least expected.
Beth never anticipated her life would end up like it did. The last beating she received at the hands of her boyfriend threw her over the edge. She had to escape him, so she fled taking her daughter Lilly with her. She didn't know where she'd go, but she didn't care. All she could manage to think about was the safety of her unborn child and her daughter Lilly. The frequent stops the mother and daughter had to make were uneventful until Beth pulled into a Diner in Moore, Oklahoma where her daughter Lilly was taken by unseen hands. Detective's Daniel Prescott and Frank Martinez head the investigation trying relentlessly to solve the case before it's too late. These days, when children are taken it's a unified frenzy to find them. In this case, every lead turns up empty and every turn they take reveals a clue they couldn't have anticipated. The detectives aren't quite sure where to turn or who to trust; even the mother herself is a prime suspect. The Abduction of Lilly Waters is a fast paced child abduction thriller that will leave you on the edge of your seat in anticipation until the end where you'll discover the deepest and darkest secret waiting.
Claude Monet (1840-1926) was one of the first artists to move his studio out into the open air, creating works which continue to fascinate and inspire us today as much as they did his contemporaries. One of the founding fathers of Impressionist art, Monet's works consistently reflect the artist's profound love of nature. Many of his paintings were directly inspired by the gardens that played such an important role in his life--the garden at his house in S¿vres in the 1860s, those at his two homes in Argenteuil in the 1870s, followed by a garden at his estate in Vatheuil. Yet the most famous of Monet's gardens was the expansive park in Giverny, which inspired his masterful handling of light and color for more than thirty years and provided motifs for hundreds of individual paintings and series that remain immensely popular today--among them the masterpieces of his Water-Lilies series. This magnificent volume of full-page color plates is devoted to this central theme in the work of the French artist. It presents landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of people in natural settings from nearly all of Monet's creative periods--from his early Impressionist paintings of the 1870s to the Grandes Dacorations of the early 1900s. Also included are photographs of Monet's gardens, diagrammatic recreations of these spaces (based on the artist's paintings), several bills of delivery and planting instructions from horticulturalists.
