Author Renee Simmons Raney believes that every child deserves his or her own personal landscape in which to seek adventure and unleash creativity. Through this charming storybook, Renee weaves fairy stories, enhancing the natural world with supernatural creatures, and connecting children to diverse habitats, creatures, seasons, and holidays while inspiring a sense of place, a land conservation ethic, and a comfortable fearlessness for outdoor exploration. Hairy, Scary, but Mostly Merry Fairies! also includes activities that encourage families and school classes to explore their natural surroundings and to engage in imaginative play. It offers a multi-generational remedy for curing nature deficiency.

Author Renee Simmons Raney believes that every child deserves his or her own personal landscape in which to seek adventure and unleash creativity. Through this charming storybook, Renee weaves fairy stories, enhancing the natural world with supernatural creatures, and connecting children to diverse habitats, creatures, seasons, and holidays while inspiring a sense of place, a land conservation ethic, and a comfortable fearlessness for outdoor exploration. Hairy, Scary, but Mostly Merry Fairies! includes activities that encourage families and school classes to explore their natural surroundings and to engage in imaginative play, and it offers a multi-generational remedy for curing nature deficiency.

Stink’s spider phobia spurs his sister, Judy, and friend Webster to try some desensitization techniques—until a real-life encounter takes them by surprise—in a hilarious episode offering a bonus origami activity. Creepy! Crawly! Criminy! Everyone knows that Stink is bonkers about most scientific things. But there’s one exception: dangle a spider in front of him and he goes berserk! Stink is so freaked out by spiders that he can’t read about them. He can’t look at them. He can’t think about them. And he for-sure can’t touch them! Stink has arachnophobia (a fear of spiders), and he has it bad. But when a hairy backyard emergency arises, Stink is forced to face his fear—and eight beady eyes—head-on. Will he manage to tame the heebie-jeebies, or will he remain stuck in his web of terror? Arachno-fans will love the comics sprinkled throughout with facts about spiders as well as a hands-on origami challenge.

The fascinating story of a trial that opened a window onto the century-long battle to control nature in the national parks. When twenty-five-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been. The proceedings drew to the witness stand some of the most important figures in twentieth century wilderness management, including the eminent zoologist A. Starker Leopold, who had produced a landmark conservationist document in the 1950s, and all-American twin researchers John and Frank Craighead, who ran groundbreaking bear studies at Yellowstone. Their testimony would help decide whether the government owed the Walker family restitution for Harry's death, but it would also illuminate decades of patchwork efforts to preserve an idea of nature that had never existed in the first place. In this remarkable excavation of American environmental history, nature writer and former park ranger Jordan Fisher Smith uses Harry Walker's story to tell the larger narrative of the futile, sometimes fatal, attempts to remake wilderness in the name of preserving it. Tracing a course from the founding of the national parks through the tangled twentieth-century growth of the conservationist movement, Smith gives the lie to the portrayal of national parks as Edenic wonderlands unspoiled until the arrival of Europeans, and shows how virtually every attempt to manage nature in the parks has only created cascading effects that require even more management. Moving across time and between Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier national parks, Engineering Eden shows how efforts at wilderness management have always been undone by one fundamental problem--that the idea of what is "wild" dissolves as soon as we begin to examine it, leaving us with little framework to say what wilderness should look like and which human interventions are acceptable in trying to preserve it. In the tradition of John McPhee's The Control of Nature and Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Jordan Fisher Smith has produced a powerful work of popular science and environmental history, grappling with critical issues that we have even now yet to resolve.

Tom is in shock. He's just discovered that his dad is an escaped fairy on the run. Tom doesn't know he is a demisprite - the child of a fairy and a human - until he meets his three fairy godmothers. They've been summoned to protect him, but they can't stop bickering, and two of them are hardened criminals. Tom must survive their botched magic spells, learn to fly and enter the dangerous Fairy Realm to save his parents... From the author of BESWITCHED One of the most enchanting, funny and suspenseful stories to have been published for some time THE TIMES

Smith chronicles his 14 years as a park ranger on a huge tract of government land in the Sierras, illuminating some startling truths about America's wild lands.

The Nightmare Affair is the first in a gripping new urban fantasy trilogy by Mindee Arnett. Sixteen-year-old Dusty Everhart breaks into houses late at night, but not because she's a criminal. No, she's a Nightmare. Literally. Being the only Nightmare at Arkwell Academy, a boarding school for magickind, and living in the shadow of her mother's infamy, is hard enough. But when Dusty sneaks into Eli Booker's house, things get a whole lot more complicated. He's hot, which means sitting on his chest and invading his dreams couldn't get much more embarrassing. But it does. Eli is dreaming of a murder. Then Eli's dream comes true. Now Dusty has to follow the clues—both within Eli's dreams and out of them—to stop the killer before more people turn up dead. And before the killer learns what she's up to and marks her as the next target. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In The Witching Hours, Anna and Max travel the world with their father, the Professor - but their real adventures take place in the dangerous underworld of dark fairies, where the children face sinister creatures and battle for their lives. Trapped in a decaying mansion beside a graveyard, Anna's only wish is to survive the night - but in the wild woodlands of the United States, evil forces are gathering fast. Sinister women lurk in the shadows, observing Anna and Max wherever they go, their eyes bright enough to wake the dead. There are also strange reports from their friends overseas, revealing a new danger only the siblings can see. With a gigantic monster about to rise from the earth, it seems the witching hour has finally arrived ... Fee-fi-fo-RUN!

A new play from the Platform initiative, which comprises big-cast plays with predominantly female casts, written specifically for youth performers.