With decodable text and inviting illustrations, these stories will help kids have fun while learning how to read. Readers will enjoy this pair of stories featuring a monkey on a mission and a jam-packed car.
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Paradise isn’t quite what it seems as four college friends meet for an island vacation in this captivating new novel from the acclaimed author of These Girls. An all-expense-paid week at a luxury villa in Jamaica—it’s the invitation of a lifetime for a group of old college friends. All four women are desperate not just for a reunion, but for an escape: Tina is drowning under the demands of mothering four young children. Allie is shattered by the news that a genetic illness runs in her family. Savannah is carrying the secret of her husband’s infidelity. And, finally, there’s Pauline, who spares no expense to throw her wealthy husband an unforgettable thirty-fifth birthday celebration, hoping it will gloss over the cracks already splitting apart their new marriage. Languid hours on a private beach, gourmet dinners, and late nights of drinking kick off an idyllic week for the women and their husbands. But as a powerful hurricane bears down on the island, turmoil swirls inside the villa, forcing each of the women to reevaluate everything she knows about her friends—and herself.
If Freedoms Means as Much to You is the story of the contribution of the two World Wars by the citizens of the town of Meaford and St. Vincent Township. The enthusiasm of the first men who signed up is balanced with the pain inflicted by the cruelty on prisoners of war in both wars. Letters from England show their pluck during the Blitz. Letters from soldiers in all the theatres, in both wars, bridge the oceans. When the Tank Range was created in 1942, the owners of farms and orchards become war refugees. Interviews of women who served in the armed services show their accomplishments; and interviews of war-bride couples reveal the hope of a new life away from the restrictions of rationing in Britain.