Dragon S Song

An "excellent collection....Prelutsky and Sis...bring to life so many sorts of dragons: the large, the small, the ferocious, the technological, the gentle, the ominous, and the disconsolate. There's a `just right' quality to the verse that makes it a pleasure to read the words aloud. Their sounds fit together with seamless craftsmanship and their sense rewards listeners with humor, imagination, and occasional poignancy....Because it appeals on so many levels, this is one poetry book that won't siton the shelf for long."--Booklist.

"She was different now, far different than the girl who had left the battlements of Domar with nothing more than a dream and emptiness where a dragon should be." Selah of Domar always felt a special connection to dragons. Since a young age, the great beasts provided her the security and solace that her family could not. Selah wrestles for something more, but she doesn't know which direction to take. When a recruiting dragonrider offers her a place oftraining at Dragonhold, the fortress of the dragonriders, sheeagerly accepts. As the lone female apprentice at Dragonhold, Selah faces resistance from her peers. It is during the Choosing, a ceremony where newborn dragons select their caretakers, that Selah learns her true heritage. A terrible accident interrupts the ritual, leaving Selah at the mercy of the dragon god, Stormhunter. The secret he reveals forces Selah to come toterms with what she truly is, but the truth will change her forever--and attract the attention of those who wish the end of the dragonriders.

There s a crocodile in the closet. Don t go inside! Let s put him in the attic, then run downstairs and hide!

A born naturalist and a fearless traveler, Vladimir Dinets wrote travel guides, conducted field research, and lived a couple of lives before he was accepted into the PhD program in zoology at the University of Miami. He thought crocodiles were a dead-end research topic—survivors from the age of the dinosaurs but not much else—until he witnessed groups of up to seventy alligators performing mating choruses that included infrasound vibrations—a form of communication extremely rare in nature—and a “dance” unknown in the scientific literature but that resembled a scene from Jurassic Park. To prove his thesis about the language of crocodiles, he spent the next six years traveling around the world on shoestring budgets and in extreme circumstances, studying almost every living species. At the same time, as a man desiring companionship in life, he sought love. With adventures on five continents, Dragon Songs is his account of this quest. It includes an escape from a boiling lava lake in the Afar Desert, being chased up a tree by a tiger in India, hitching a ride with a cocaine smuggler in Bolivia, and diving with giant Greenland sharks—all in the name of studying crocodiles, among which he routinely paddled in his inflatable kayak. Of course, not everything went according to plan. But, in the end, his ground-breaking research helped change the field. And during the course of his adventures, he met and courted his future wife.

First in an exciting fantasy saga from the co-creator of Dragonlance The Elves of the Rhonas Empire have carved a path of conquest throughout the civilized lands, enslaving humans, chimera, manticores, goblins, and every other race they encounter. Now humans are a nearly extinct minority among the warrior-slave races, their will and memories suppressed by the tyrannical, magic-wielding elves. But legends tell of a time when humans and the other slave races were free. There are tales of a hero who will return one day to lead them in an uprising against their masters. That hero, so the stories say, will be a human named Drakis. But Drakis Sha’Timuran, a human warrior-slave of House Timuran, gives no credence to these legends. He fights for the glory of his House and his elven masters along with the other members of his Cohort. But as they embark on the final stage of a campaign to bring down the last dwarf king, Drakis finds himself troubled by a song—a melody that coils itself around his mind and conjures disturbing visions of dark wings, claws, iridescent scales, and fire. In the midst of a devastating battle, the song leads Drakis to capture a mysterious dwarf as a prize of war. When Drakis returns to his master with his prisoner, the dwarf uses his own magic to shatter the spell over the entire household. Along with the other slaves, Drakis suddenly recalls the truth of his enslavement, the terrible cruelty of his masters, and their deceit. But if everything he knows about his world and his life is a lie, what is the truth? And does the lure of the song—now calling him northward into the heart of a vanished civilization—herald the beginning of a new dawn or the promise of eternal night?

Only a naive misfit with the perfect voice can save the world with lost magic.

Bold, unguarded work . . . that resists pat definition. [Young Jean] Lee has penned profane lampoons of motivational bromides (Pullman, WA) and the Romantic poets (The Appeal). Now she piles her deconstructive scorn upon ethnic stereotypes in Song...