The Dandelion Years

A gorgeous tale of friendship and love from Sunday Times bestseller Erica James. Ashcombe was the most beautiful house Saskia had ever seen as a little girl. A rambling pink cottage on the edge of the Suffolk village of Melbury Green, its enchanting garden provided a fairy-tale playground of seclusion, a perfect sanctuary to hide from the tragedy which shattered her childhood. Now an adult, Saskia is still living at Ashcombe and as a book restorer devotes her days tending to the broken, battered books that find their way to her, daydreaming about the people who had once turned their pages. When she discovers a notebook carefully concealed in an old Bible - and realising someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to hide a story of their own - Saskia finds herself drawn into a heart-rending tale of wartime love...

From one of the world's foremost researchers and pioneers of pediatric health--a book that offers hope and a pathway to success for parents, teachers, psychologists, pyschiatrists, and child development experts coping with "difficult" children. A book that fully explores the author's revolutionary discovery about childhood development, parenting, and the key to helping all children find happiness and success. In The Orchid and the Dandelion, Dr. W. Thomas Boyce writes of the "dandelion" child (hardy, resilient, healthy), able to survive and flourish under most circumstances, and the "orchid" child (sensitive, susceptible, fragile), who, given the right support, can thrive as much as, if not more than, other children. For the past four decades Boyce has been working with troubled children. The Orchid and the Dandelion offers help to those who have lost their confidence in the promise of a child gone seriously adrift--into drug abuse, delinquency, depression, or destructive friendships, the dark territory of psychological trouble, school failure, or criminality. Boyce's breakthrough research reveals how genetic makeup and environment shape behavior. Rather than seeing this "risk" gene as a liability, through his daring research, Boyce has recast the way we think of human frailty and shows that while variant genes can create problems (susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors), they can also, in the right setting and with the right nurturing, produce children who not only do better than before but far exceed their peers. He describes what it is to be an "orchid" child, to live a life far more intense, painful, vivid, and variable than that of a dandelion. For orchid children, the world is often a frightening and overwhelming place. He makes clear that orchids are not failed dandelions and shows people how to embrace the unique gifts, abilities, and strengths of orchid children and how to create and environment at home and work that will allow them to flourish. Boyce writes, as well, of dandelions: how vital they are to what George Eliot describes as "the growing good of the world," even in the midst of their own struggles and life challenges. He writes of his own family, particularly of his sister, the inspiration for his work, an orchid child overcome by the family's tragedies and sadnesses to which the author, as a dandelion child, was impervious. And we come to understand that beneath the servicable categories of "orchid" and "dandelion" lies the truer reality of a continuum, a spectrum of sensitivities to the world, along which we all have a place.

Close your eyes, make a wish, and blow up a storm with this interactive, imaginative adventure for fans of Press Here. Jonah's nana has always told him that some dandelions are magical and can grant wishes. When a wish turns Jonah into a pirate, it's up to the reader to help him navigate the choppy waters and all the great monsters he meets by blowing the wind, making faces, and doing raspberries.

When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again. Now, as a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily’s previously stateless father wanted them to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Asia. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua’s disappearance, Lily’s family is nonetheless stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth. Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging.

Sniffing around for a good story? It's a smelly prehistoric world for Sid, the sloth, Manny, the wooly mammoth, Diego, the saber-toothed tiger, and Roshan, the human baby! This delightful Ice Age scratch-and-sniff book will take you back, smells and all, to your favorite movie of the year.

The summer of '28 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding—remembered forever by the incomparable Ray Bradbury. The only god living in Green Town, Illinois, that Douglas Spaulding knew of. The facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated. • He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began. • Could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine. • Could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream. • Could hit baseballs into apple trees, knocking down harvests. • Could jump six-foot orchard walls. • Ran laughing. • Sat easy. • Was not a bully. • Was kind. • Knew the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. • Knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise or set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of. “[Ray] Bradbury is an authentic original.”—Time

With the invasion of Dara complete, and the Wall of Storms breached, the world has opened to new possibilities for the gods and peoples of both empires as the sweeping saga of the award-winning Dandelion Dynasty continues in this third book of the “magnificent fantasy epic” (NPR). Princess Théra, once known as Empress Üna of Dara, entrusted the throne to her younger brother in order to journey to Ukyu-Gondé to war with the Lyucu. She has crossed the fabled Wall of Storms with a fleet of advanced warships and ten thousand people. Beset by adversity, Théra and her most trusted companions attempt to overcome every challenge by doing the most interesting thing. But is not letting the past dictate the present always possible or even desirable? In Dara, the Lyucu leadership as well as the surviving Dandelion Court bristle with rivalries as currents of power surge and ebb and perspectives spin and shift. Here, parents and children, teachers and students, Empress and Pékyu, all nurture the seeds of plans that will take years to bloom. Will tradition yield to new justifications for power? Everywhere, the spirit of innovation dances like dandelion seeds on the wind, and the commoners, the forgotten, the ignored begin to engineer new solutions for a new age. Ken Liu returns to the series that draws from a tradition of the great epics of our history from the Aeneid to the Romance on the Three Kingdoms and builds a new tale unsurpassed in its scope and ambition.

A secret that changed everything... Katie Lavender has always thought she was pretty unshockable, until a year after her mother's death she receives a letter from a solicitor telling her that the man she thought was her father, in fact wasn't. Her real father, a man named Stirling Nightingale, has for years been building a trust fund for her. And now she's of an age to collect it. But Katie's not interested in the money. She wants to know about the man instead. So decides to do some snooping. She tracks him down to a beautiful riverside home on the night he's hosting a birthday party for his ninety-year-old mother. And as she's hovering outside, Katie is mistaken for a replacement waitress - an opportunity just too good to miss. And so Katie discovers that the Nightingales are far from your normal family...But what makes a normal family anyway?