The Night Circus is one of these rarities - engrossing, beautifully written and utterly enchanting. You will not want to leave it.â - T a Obreht, author of The Tigerâs Wife "Every once in awhile you find a novel so magical that there is no escaping its spell. The Night Circus pulls you into a world as dark as it is dazzling, fully-realized but still something out of a dream. This is one of the best books I have ever read.â - Brunonia Barry, author of The Lace Reader âA riveting debut. This is a love story on a grand scale: it creates, it destroys, it ultimately transcends. Likely to be a big book-and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings." - Kirkus Reviews (in a starred review) ââDark as soot and bright as sparks,â The Night Circus still holds me willingly captive in a world of almost unbearable beauty. Praise for THE NIGHT CIRCUS: "Self-assured, entertaining debut that blends genres and crosses continents in quest of magic& Generous in its vision and fun to read.
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Call, now in their middle years, are just beginning to deal with the enigmas of the adult heart - Gus with his great love, Clara Forsythe and Call with Maggie Tilton, the young whore who loves him. Texas Rangers August McCrae and Woodrow F. The epic four-volume cycle that began with Larry McMurty's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Lonesome Dove, is completed with this brilliant and haunting novel - a capstone in a mighty tradition of storytelling. A clever and engaging read that will satisfy more than just fans of the paranormal.- Donna Rosenblum, Floral Park Memorial High School, NYĬopyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.įebru"There's something about having a fight with a ghost that makes you paranoid in the morning." On his first day at an exclusive private high school in Santa Monica, freshman Jeff Clayson discovers that he is being stalked by the ghost of a former student who drowned two years earlier. Full of well-developed characters, this ghostly tale tackles complicated themes such as acceptance, bullying, and atonement that readers will relate to. Pike delivers an insightfully written, fast-paced, and witty plot told from a teenage boy's point of view. His agreeing to help Kimberlee with her "unfinished business" begins a whirlwind adventure full of secrets, lies, unlikely friendships, romance, and important lessons about the price of redemption. Unfortunately for him, she is dead and he is the only one who can see or hear her. Being the odd man out intensifies when on Jeff's first day he encounters none other than Kimberlee Schaffer. Uprooted from his middle-class world by his parents so that his mother can pursue an acting career, he now lives with them in an upscale section of California, drives a BMW, and attends a prep school. Gr 9 Up-Jeff Clayson's life has been turned upside down in more ways than one. Massive stains are spreading like bruises from horizon to horizon the great winged stormhunters are gathering as if summoned, ceaselessly circling, and a deep sense of wrong pervades the world.įrom the streets of Rome to the caves of the Kirin and beyond, humans, chimaera, and seraphim will fight, strive, love, and die in an epic theater that transcends good and evil, right and wrong, friend and enemy.Īt the very barriers of space and time, what do gods and monsters dream of? And does anything else matter? Plot Summary A vicious queen is hunting Akiva, and, in the skies of Eretz.something is happening. Toward a new way of living, and maybe even love.īut there are bigger threats than Jael in the offing. It is a twisted version of their long-ago dream, and they begin to hope that it might forge a way forward for their people.Īnd, perhaps, for themselves. When Jael’s brutal seraph army trespasses into the human world, the unthinkable becomes essential, and Karou and Akiva must ally their enemy armies against the threat. The future rests on her, if there can even be a future for the chimaera in war-ravaged Eretz. By way of a staggering deception, Karou has taken control of the chimaera rebellion and is intent on steering its course away from dead-end vengeance. Herbert usually writes at a fairly frantic pace and the same is true here. Although the main focus of the story is on the job Ash is at Comraich Castle to do, I found that the little snippets of the residents' back stories added a little bit extra and I found myself enjoying those minor diversions just as much as I enjoyed the main story. The basic idea behind the story is intriguing and the mixture of fiction with real life names and the stretching of fact works rather well. David Ash is sent in to investigate, but he is warned that he must work alone and in secrecy, as whilst some of the residents of Comraich Castle are not ghosts, they are considered long dead by the outside world and that world must never know of their continued existence. There are strange goings on at Comraich Castle, with the normal poltergeist type activities of cold spots in rooms and the lights inexplicably dimming having escalated into a resident being found pinned to the wall of his room by his own blood and innards. Herbert's two previous books featuring parapsychologist David Ash were pretty good, so I was looking forward to the third, simply titled Ash. Indeed, he's one of the few authors to have genuinely scared me, at the point I realised the location of an army of rats in Domain was between the tube station I was getting off at and the office I had to walk to. I've read and enjoyed most of James Herbert's books up until now. Her work is awash with color, atmosphere, and a stunning visual splendor that will enchant children while indulging their wilder tendencies. In her debut picture book, Hughes brings an uncanny humor to her painterly illustrations. But will civilization get comfortable with her? Now she lives in the comfort of civilization. She's puzzled by their behavior and their insistence on living in these strange concrete structures: there's no green here, no animals, no trees, no rivers. That is, until she is snared by some very strange animals that look oddly like her, but they don't talk right, eat right, or play correctly. She is unashamedly, irrefutably, irrepressibly wild. In this beautiful picture book by Hawaiian artist Emily Hughes, we meet a little girl who has known nothing but nature from birth-she was taught to talk by birds, to eat by bears, and to play by foxes. "You cannot tame something so happily wild." When the press gets wind of Zoe and Chase's secret relationship, their romance turns into tabloid headlines. But his feelings for Zoe might be a lot more than just an online flirtation. He's been burned enough to know he needs to keep his heart close. Chase knows better than to trust anyone from the Internet, but Zoe's saucy challenge has totally caught his interest, and her girl-next-door personality is keeping it. Now she must decide between walking away or meeting her crush in person. Ultrahot A-lister Chase Covington doesn't just respond to Zoe's tweet, he does the unthinkable: he messages Zoe directly. "With one uncharacteristically sassy tweet to her longtime celebrity crush, Zoe Miller's life turns upside down. He's been burned enough to know he needs to keep his. That is why “unlearning” is often a lot harder than learning, and why early childhood education is so important – it’s best to get it right early, before the “bad habit” gets a competitive advantage.” (p.60) But when we learn a bad habit, it takes over brain map and prevents the use of that space for “good” habits. When we try to break a bad habit, we think the solution is to put something new into the container. “ Competitive plasticity also explains why our bad habits are so difficult to break or “unlearn.” Most of us think of the brain as a container and learning as putting something in it. “ doesn’t simply learn it is always “ learning how to learn.””(Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself, p.47) The Canadian-born and Toronto-based psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author describes the “behind the scenes” processes in our neurological networks, and the ways in which our brains constantly rewire themselves when we undergo various positive and negative experiences, growth, learning, damage, behavioural changes, relationships, addictions, fetishes, dysfunctions, traumas, or therapy. Here are some of his most interesting observations: Norman Doidge’s best-selling book The Brain That Changes Itself (2007) provides a detailed account of the latest discoveries in neuroscience and brain plasticity. In uplifting voices on the asexual spectrum and research into asexuality, Brown wants to emphasize that beyond compulsory heterosexuality, there is a wider idea that sex itself is a requirement for full admittance into the human experience. Each chapter explores a different dimension of compulsory sexuality, which is a term Brown uses to build on top of the more well-known compulsory heterosexuality, which is the idea that social pressures encourage and reward heterosexual expressions of love and desire and punishes those who deviate from that norm. The book comprises twelve chapters (plus a foreword, introduction, and afterword). Not only does it discuss the ways in which our society privileges allosexual people and pairings, but it also challenges some of my understandings as a white person, getting me to think about the intersections of racism and acephobia. So of course I leaped at the chance to read Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. I know that’s not entirely the case, though, and am always looking to broaden my knowledge about those who study and write about asexuality. In particular, it feels like we are usually an afterthought when it comes to research about queer people and sexuality. Sometimes being asexual (and in my case, aromantic) can feel very lonely, for reasons perhaps obvious but which I will elaborate on in a moment. Strategies and examples serve as resources for students' own writing, and students can then explore how the same story can be introduced in different ways. Then, the teacher guides the class in categorizing their favorite "hooks" according to the author's strategy (e.g., question, exaggeration, exclamation, description). Students work in pairs to read introductory passages from several fiction texts and rate them for effectiveness. This site from NASA uses an interactive story to help children learn about bats, their habits and habitats.įishing for Readers: Identifying and Writing Effective Opening "Hooks" This page begins with a report of an unusual bat phenomenon in Texas and then lists possible bat-related activities.Ī great resource on bats to support reading This lesson is designed for grades K-2.īuild prior knowledge with these worksheets and other activities.īats in the Classroom: Activities Across The Curriculum Children first identify possible factual information from works of fiction which are read aloud, then they listen to read-alouds of nonfiction texts to identify and confirm factual information. This lesson describes how to use selected fiction and nonfiction literature and careful questioning techniques to help students identify factual information about animals. |