Welcome to a book-lover's best friend! This collection of engaging and content-focused activities will help you nurture literacy in your classroom--or the entire school. Filled to the brim with suggestions for engaging students with books in a meaningful and academic way, you will be able to use these activities with small or large groups. They allow students to bring their own reading experience-regardless of level of proficiency-to the table to use as the basis for learning about reading and writing. And this resource will help mentor every student's most effective literacy model--you! You'll be given full background information for all activities so that you can set the tone for a confident and considered approach to the love of books!

From banned books to feuding authors, from literary felons to rejected masterpieces, from tips for aspiring writers to stand-out book lists, this treasure trove of compelling facts, riveting anecdotes and extraordinary characters is every book-lover’s dream: a book about books and the people who write them. Read all about it!

From the author of the "Little Farm" homesteading memoirs comes a friendly, down-to-earth little guide for starting and maintaining a thriving food garden. In Little Farm in the Garden, Susan Colleen Browne shares the evolution of her own homestead garden with warmth and humor. Whether you’re starting with a pot, a small plot, or dedicated garden beds, she covers how to start growing your own food with basic nut-and-bolts like selecting crops, raising food without chemicals, and creating healthy soil. If you've read Susan's Little Farm memoirs, this booklet can be a handy addition to the homesteading experiences she's shared in her books. But Little Farm in the Garden also works as a stand-alone manual for simple ways to approach creating your own food supply, focusing on easy-to-grow vegetables, herbs, and fruit, and building a balanced garden for the long-term. In these uncertain times, producing your own food supply can give you confidence in the future—and as all gardening fans know, a sense of pleasure and accomplishment. Wherever you are in your gardening journey, Little Farm in the Garden offers a lively, heartfelt approach for gardeners, nature-lovers, and dreamers of all ages! And if you like fiction with a gardening theme, you might look at Susan's novel, The Galway Girls—the story has some intriguing tie-ins with her real-life experiences in Book 2 of the Little Farm series, Little Farm Homegrown... Susan's upcoming release is her latest Irish novel, The Fairy Cottage of Ballydara!

A suburban housewife’s picture-perfect life is shattered in this riveting true crime book from the author of Evil Next Door. When Nancy Cooper moved from Canada to Cary, North Carolina, with her new husband Brad, their future was bright. Living in one of the most picturesque towns in the United States, the couple mingled with neighbors, attended parties, and raised two daughters. Then, on July 14, 2008, the façade came crashing down when Nancy’s strangled body was found in a storm pond. Nancy’s husband claimed she had gone for a jog and never came back. But as the police investigation deepened, a complex web of affairs and lies involving multiple residents of Cary’s idyllic neighborhoods was uncovered, and Brad was brought to trial for the murder of his wife. At the heart of it stood the Coopers’ soured marriage, Nancy’s threat to leave with the children, and her own cold-blooded murder. It would take a mountain of damning evidence before justice was served.

Hemingway's deeply reflective account of his destructive Paris affair and how it affected the legendary life he rebuilt after, as told to his best friend, the writer A.E. Hotchner. In June of 1961, A. E. Hotchner visited a close friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke - three weeks later, Ernest Hemingway returned home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a saga that Hemingway had unraveled for Hotchner over years of world travel. Ernest always kept a few of his special experiences off the page, storing them as insurance against a dry-up of ideas. But after a near miss with death, he entrusted his most meaningful tale to Hotchner, so that if he never got to write it himself, then at least someone would know. In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway divulged the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he gambled and lost Hadley, the great love he'd spend the rest of his life seeking. But the search was not without its notable moments, and he told of those, too: of impotence cured in a house of God; of back-to-back plane crashes in the African bush, one of which nearly killed him, while he emerged from the other brandishing a bottle of gin and a bunch of bananas; of cocktails and commiseration with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as few have known him - humble, thoughtful, and full of regret. To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife, Mary, who was also a close friend, Hotch kept these conversations to himself for decades. Now he tells the story as Hemingway told it to him. Hemingway in Love puts you in the room with the master and invites you to listen as he relives the drama of those young, definitive years that set the course for the rest of his life and dogged him to the end of his days.

Discover the million-copy-bestselling and multi-award winning series with this ten-book-collection. Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong are pupils at Deepdean School for Girls, best friends - and detectives. Or, at least, they would be, if they could find any interesting cases to solve. Then the body of their teacher, Miss Bell, is discovered in the school gym, and the girls must put their detective skills to the test at last . . . From a murder mystery in a London theatre to a mysterious death on the Orient Express, a dastardly kidnapping in Hong Kong to their most perilous case on the River Nile, Daisy and Hazel can crack any case. Includes: Murder Most Unladylike Arsenic For Tea First Class Murder Jolly Foul Play Mistletoe and Murder Death in the Spotlight A Spoonful of Murder Top Marks For Murder Death Sets Sail Cream Buns and Crime

Behind every great love song is a great love story, from the author of Star-Crossed NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • “A tender tribute to the healing powers of love and music . . . Readers will be wowed.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) Concert pianist Diana is finally ready to marry her longtime fiance, Arie; she’s even composing a beautiful love song for him, and finishes it while on tour. Before she can play it for him, though, tragedy strikes—and Diana is lost to Arie forever. But her song might not be. In Australia, the world has gone quiet for Arie and he lives his life accordingly, struggling to cope with his loss. In Scotland, a woman named Evie is taking stock of her life after the end of another lackluster almost-relationship. Years of wandering the globe and failing to publish her poetry have taken their toll, and she might finally be ready to find what her travels have never been able to give her: a real home. And through a quirk of fate or circumstance, Diana’s song is passed from musician to musician. By winding its way around the world, it just might bring these two lost souls together. With heart-wrenching emotion, The Last Love Song explores what it means to be lost, what it means to be found, and the power of music to bring people together.

The “fascinating” true story behind the HBO Max and Hulu series about Texas housewife Candy Montgomery and the bizarre murder that shocked a community (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore had a lot in common: They sang together in the Methodist church choir, their daughters were best friends, and their husbands had good jobs working for technology companies in the north Dallas suburbs known as Silicon Prairie. But beneath the placid surface of their seemingly perfect lives, both women simmered with unspoken frustrations and unanswered desires. On a hot summer day in 1980, the secret passions and jealousies that linked Candy and Betty exploded into murderous rage. What happened next is usually the stuff of fiction. But the bizarre and terrible act of violence that occurred in Betty’s utility room that morning was all too real. Based on exclusive interviews with the Gore and Montgomery families, Edgar Award finalist Evidence of Love is the “superbly written” account of a gruesome tragedy and the trial that made national headlines when the defendant entered the most unexpected of pleas: not guilty by reason of self-defense (Fort Worth Star-Telegram). Adapted into the Emmy and Golden Globe Award–winning television movie A Killing in a Small Town—as well as the new limited series Candy on Hulu and Love and Death on HBO Max—this chilling tale of sin and savagery will “fascinate true crime aficionados” (Kirkus Reviews).

Oliver Barrett IV found his true soulmate when he met and fell in love with Jenny Cavilleri. Their love was magical, exhilarating . . . and though heartbreakingly brief, it was enough to last a lifetime. Or so Oliver told himself. Two years have passed since Jenny was taken from him, and Oliver truly believes he will never love again. Then one day, Marcie—beautiful and mysterious—enters his world . . . and suddenly the future holds a golden new promise. The poignant and unforgettable sequel to the beloved classic Love Story is a beautiful tale of one man's journey out of the lonely darkness of grief and back into love's warm embrace— a story that will capture your heart as only Erich Segal can.

It was raining and blowing at Eldridge's Crossing. From the stately pine-trees on the hill-tops, which were dignifiedly protesting through their rigid spines upward, to the hysterical willows in the hollow, that had whipped themselves into a maudlin fury, there was a general tumult. When the wind lulled, the rain kept up the distraction, firing long volleys across the road, letting loose miniature cataracts from the hill-sides to brawl in the ditches, and beating down the heavy heads of wild oats on the levels; when the rain ceased for a moment the wind charged over the already defeated field, ruffled the gullies, scattered the spray from the roadside pines, and added insult to injury. But both wind and rain concentrated their energies in a malevolent attempt to utterly disperse and scatter the Half-way House, which seemed to have wholly lost its way, and strayed into the open, where, dazed and bewildered, unprepared and unprotected, it was exposed to the taunting fury of the blast. A loose, shambling, disjointed, hastily built structure-representing the worst features of Pioneer renaissance-it rattled its loose window-sashes like chattering teeth, banged its ill-hung shutters, and admitted so much of the invading storm, that it might have blown up or blown down with equal facility.