Lonely and shy, ten-year-old May Ellen Bird has no idea what awaits her when she falls into the lake and enters The Ever After, home of ghosts and the Bogey Man.

This third and final installment of Andersons Ever After saga delivers even more of the sly hilarity and horror, original touches, and poignant moments that earned starred reviews for the first two novels of the trilogy.

At Hog Wallow Middle School, May Ellen Bird was always slightly invisible. Then she went on a long trip to the land of the dead, where ghost towns glowed blue in the dark dusk and spooky specters dwelled in cities on the Dead Sea. Back on Earth at last, May and her hairless cat, Somber Kitty, are now famous, their faces plastered across souvenirs and sportswear that read "May Bird Went to the Land of the Dead and All She Brought Me Was This Lousy T-Shirt." But, finally in the spotlight, May feels more than ever that she doesn't belong. Every night she sits by her bedroom window, gazing at the sky and dreaming of another place, wishing -- despite herself -- to be back among the ghosts. And then one night she gets her heart's desire in a way she would never have wished for. Only the Ever After isn't anything like the world May left behind three years ago. The spirits have vanished, and the towns -- once full of every manner of things that go bump in the night -- are deserted. Evil Bo Cleevil has made the Ever After as cold as his own frigid soul, and put up a bunch of tacky malls to boot. Now, with her friends missing and enemies all around her, May must find her way to the edge of the universe, where night swallows the stars, where allies are few and often have bad breath, where endings can also be beginnings, and where the truest hero lurks in the unlikeliest of souls. But Bo Cleevil's got one last trick up his sleeve -- one that no one on Earth is ready for. With the worlds of the living and the dead in the balance, will May's courage fail her one last time? Or will she finally become the warrior she was always meant to be?

The story of a young girl living in the Middle Ages who took the time to observe the life cycle of butteflies--and in so doing disproved a theory that went all the way back to ancient Greece. Includes historical note.

When the precocious Russell meets a huge flightless jungle bird named Kevin, they become the best of friends, in this Step 2 Reader based on the latest Disney 2 Pixar release, "Up." Full color.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train and The Exiles comes a novel about the choices we make, how they shape our lives, and how they can change them forever. Four people, two marriages, one lifelong friendship: Everything is about to change. It was dark. It was raining. It was just an accident. On the drive home from a rare evening out, Alison collides with another car running a stop sign, and—just like that—her life turns upside down. When she calls her husband, Charlie, from the police station, his accusatory tone reveals cracks in their relationship she’d never noticed were there. Now she notices everything. And she begins to realize that the life she carefully constructed for herself is as tenuous as a house of cards. The only thing Charlie can focus on these days is his secret, sudden affair with Claire, Alison’s best friend. Bold where Alison is reserved, vibrant where Alison is cautious, Claire has just had her first novel published, a thinly veiled retelling of her childhood in North Carolina. But even in the whirlwind of publication, Claire can’t stop wondering if she should leave her husband, Ben, an ambitious architect who is brilliant, kind, and meticulous. And who wants nothing more than a baby, or two—exactly the kind of life that Charlie and Alison seem to have. As they set out on their individual journeys, Alison, Charlie, Claire, and Ben explore the idea—each in his or her own way—that every moment of loss contains within it the possibility of a new life. Alternating through these four intertwined perspectives, Bird in Hand is an exquisitely written, powerful, and thrilling novel about love, friendship and betrayal, and about the secrets we tell ourselves and each other.

What is it like to be a swift, flying at over one hundred kilometres an hour? Or a kiwi, plodding flightlessly among the humid undergrowth in the pitch dark of a New Zealand night? And what is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise?Bird Sense addresses questions like these and many more, by describing the senses of birds that enable them to interpret their environment and to interact with each other. Our affinity for birds is often said to be the result of shared senses - vision and hearing - but how exactly do their senses compare with our own? And what about a birds' sense of taste, or smell, or touch or the ability to detect the earth's magnetic field? Or the extraordinary ability of desert birds to detect rain hundreds of kilometres away - how do they do it?Bird Sense is based on a conviction that we have consistently underestimated what goes on in a bird's head. Our understanding of bird behaviour is simultaneously informed and constrained by the way we watch and study them. By drawing attention to the way these frameworks both facilitate and inhibit discovery, it identifies ways we can escape from them to seek new horizons in bird behaviour.There has never been a popular book about the senses of birds. No one has previously looked at how birds interpret the world or the way the behaviour of birds is shaped by their senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of observation and an understanding of birds and their behaviour that is firmly grounded in science.

Told in diary form by an irresistible heroine, this “heartfelt, bittersweet, and ever-so-clever coming-of-age fantasy” (School Library Journal, starred review) named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year from the New York Times bestselling author of the May Bird trilogy sparkles with science, myth, magic, and the strange beauty of the everyday marvels we sometimes forget to notice. Spirited, restless Gracie Lockwood has lived in Cliffden, Maine, her whole life. She’s a typical girl in an atypical world: one where sasquatches helped to win the Civil War, where dragons glide over Route 1 on their way south for the winter (sometimes burning down a T.J. Maxx or an Applebee’s along the way), where giants hide in caves near LA and mermaids hunt along the beaches, and where Dark Clouds come for people when they die. To Gracie it’s all pretty ho-hum…until a Cloud comes looking for her little brother Sam, turning her small-town life upside down. Determined to protect Sam against all odds, her parents pack the family into a used Winnebago and set out on an epic search for a safe place that most people say doesn’t exist: The Extraordinary World. It’s rumored to lie at the ends of the earth, and no one has ever made it there and lived to tell the tale. To reach it, the Lockwoods will have to learn to believe in each other—and to trust that the world holds more possibilities than they’ve ever imagined.

The first of three novels about May Bird and her adventures in the ghostly world of The Ever After

Two sisters are suddenly sent from their home in Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, in Naomi Jackson’s stunning debut novel This lyrical novel of community, betrayal, and love centers on an unforgettable matriarchal family in Barbados. Two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother’s limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother’s mysterious life. This tautly paced coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family. Naomi Jackson’s Barbados and her characters are singular, especially the wise Hyacinth and the heartbreaking young Phaedra, who is coming into her own as a young woman amid the tumult of her family. Praise for The Star Side of Bird Hill: “Once in a while, you’ll stumble onto a book like this, one so poetic in its descriptions and so alive with lovable, frustrating, painfully real characters, that your emotional response to it becomes almost physical. . . . The dual coming-of-age story alone could melt the sternest of hearts, but Jackson’s exquisite prose is a marvel too. . . . A gem of a book.” —Entertainment Weekly (A)