"A gorgeous exploration of falling in love in unexpected ways—with a new place, with a new parent, and with a new ethic. This novel is a coming–of–age in the truest and fullest sense." —LAURA PRITCHETT Fourteen-year-old Charlotte moves from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to Washington's Cascade Mountains, where she hopes to continue training for the national snowboarding championships. After her father signs an anti-development petition, she loses access to the local resort and takes to the backcountry, where she meets nature on its own terms. When adventure turns to tragedy, Charlotte learns that even our deepest scars can be lucky ones.
For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people’s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it all: winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.
A personal investigative journey into the so-called Chelan Falls Massacre of 1875. Amid the current alarming rise in xenophobia, Ana Maria Spagna stumbled upon a story: one day in 1875, according to lore, on a high bluff over the Columbia River, a group of local Indigenous people murdered a large number of Chinese miners—perhaps as many as three hundred—and pushed their bodies over a cliff into the river. The little-known incident was dubbed the Chelan Falls Massacre. Despite having lived in the area for more than thirty years, Spagna had never before heard of this event. She set out to discover exactly what happened and why. Consulting historians, archaeologists, Indigenous elders, and even a grave dowser, Spagna uncovers three possible versions of the event: Native people as perpetrators. White people as perpetrators. It didn't happen at all. Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre replaces convenient narratives of the American West with nuance and complexity, revealing the danger in forgetting or remembering atrocities when history is murky and asking what allegiance to a place requires.
Featuring 500 diverse book recommendations covering a wide range of subjects, this preteen and teen reading guide is a “go-to resource for parents, students of young adult literature, teachers, and librarians” (School Library Journal). Needed now more than ever: a guide that includes 500 reading recommendations for preteens and teens with the goal of inspiring greater empathy for themselves, their peers, and the world around them. As young people are diagnosed with anxiety and depression in increasing numbers, or dealing with other issues that can isolate them from family and friends—such as bullying, learning disabilities, racism, or homophobia—characters in books can help them feel less alone. And just as important, reading books that feature a diverse range of real-life topics helps generate openness, empathy, and compassion in all kids. Reading lists are organized around topics, including: • Adoption and foster care • Body image • Immigration • Learning challenges • LGBTQIA+ youth • Mental health • Nature and environmentalism • Physical disability • Poverty and homelessness • Race and ethnicity • Religion and spirituality Each chapter explores a particular issue affecting preteens and teens today and includes a list of recommended related books—all published within the last decade. Recommendations are grouped by age: those appropriate for middle-grade readers and those for teens. Better with Books is a valuable resource for parents, teachers, librarians, therapists, and all caregivers who recognize the power of literature to improve young readers’ lives.
NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD WINNER "The problem of dominion that has always complicated humanity's relationship with wild places is at the center of Rebecca Lawton's essay collection…her expertise is apparent, as is her enthusiasm." —THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Water, the most critical fluid on the planet, is seen as savior, benefactor, and Holy Grail in these fifteen essays on natural and faux oases. Fluvial geologist and former Colorado River guide Rebecca Lawton follows species both human and wild to their watery roots—in warming deserts, near rising Pacific tides, on endangered, tapped-out rivers, and in growing urban ecosystems. Lawton thoroughly and eloquently explores human attitudes toward water in the West, from Twentynine Palms, California, to Sitka, Alaska. A lifelong immersion in all things water forms the author's deep thinking about living with this critical compound and sometimes dying in it, on it, with too much of it, or for lack of it. The Oasis This Time, the inaugural Waterston Desert Writing Prize winner, is a call for us to evolve toward a sustainable and even spiritual connection to water. REBECCA LAWTON grew up exploring rivers and deserts throughout the American West. Her writing on water, climate, and wild and human nature has been honored with a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, the Ellen Meloy Award for Desert Writers, the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, a WILLA for original softcover fiction, Pushcart Prize nominations in prose and poetry, and residencies at Hedgebrook, PLAYA, and The Island Institute. She lives with guitarist Paul Christopulos in Summer Lake, Oregon, where she directs PLAYA's residency program for writers, artists, and scientists.
A New York Times bestseller! They burned her home. They stole her brother and sister. But vengeance is following. Shy South hoped to bury her bloody past and ride away smiling, but she'll have to sharpen up some bad old ways to get her family back, and she's not a woman to flinch from what needs doing. She sets off in pursuit with only a pair of oxen and her cowardly old step father Lamb for company. But it turns out Lamb's buried a bloody past of his own. And out in the lawless Far Country the past never stays buried. Their journey will take them across the barren plains to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feud, duel and massacre, high into the unmapped mountains to a reckoning with the Ghosts. Even worse, it will force them into an alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, and his feckless lawyer Temple, two men no one should ever have to trust . . . Red Country takes place in the same world as the First Law trilogy, Best Served Cold, andThe Heroes. This novel also represents the return of Logen Ninefingers, one of Abercrombie's most beloved characters.
Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus chronicles the story of an American family against the backdrop of one of the civil rights movement's lesser-known stories. In January 1957, Joseph Spagna and five other young men waited to board a city bus called the Sunnyland in Tallahassee, Florida. Their plan was simple but dangerous: ride the bus together-three blacks and three whites-get arrested, and take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Fifty years later Ana Maria Spagna sets off on a journey to understand what happened and why.
Poems from a life spent up close and personal with nature chronicle humanity's effect on the earth, and just as importantly, the earth's effect on us. A clear-eyed, and open-hearted reckoning with contemporary life in the Anthropocene.
Dubbed "one of the most heartfelt reads of all time", Written in the Scars follows a coal miner and his wife as they work through their marriage in trouble. Layered and emotional, this book leaves readers with a gasp and hope.
When Fallon and aspiring novelist Ben meet and fall in love the day before Fallon's cross-country move, they vow to meet on the same date every year, until Fallon suspects Ben is fabricating their relationship to create the perfect plot twist.
