The Dark Tree

After hearing scary stories about the Dark Tree, Sam is afraid to go near it. After her brother, Dairy, gets stuck in the tree, she must find a way to help him before the storm. Will she be able to get over her fear of the tree? Will the siblings get to safety before the storm hits?

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton’s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists—musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists—passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

Laney and her friends have found the first Myrical. But there are four more hidden somewhere and if they fall into the Shadow Faerie's hands, his power will strengthen and the faerie world will fall under his dark reign. But Laney has problems of her own. Her magic never seems to work properly and her dad doesn't want her to get involved with the tribes at all. The second in this enchanting and mysterious faerie adventure series from Paula Harrison. Also in the series: Red Moon Rising Pale Peak Burning

In accordance with prophecy, Avalon's existence is threatened in the year that stars stop shining and at the time when both the dark child and Merlin's heir are to be revealed.

Look no further for the perfect book for boys and girls who love fantasy, adventure, and white-knuckle action! "Can you imagine eternal Darkness, sir?" So asks the sickly stranger who staggers into Peg Leg Nel's birthday party. Before the man dies, he tells Ray and his friends of a Darkness spreading like wildfire across Kansas, turning good people bad and poisoning anyone who tries to escape. It's clear that though the evil Gog is dead, his devilish machine has survived and is growing stronger. Now a full-fledged Rambler, Ray leads his friends on a mission into the heart of darkness. Vital to their success is tracking down the legendary Wolf Tree, rumored to be a pathway to the spirit world. Only with one of the tree's limbs can the Nine Pound Hammer be repaired and the Gog's terrible machine finally destroyed. The search for the Wolf Tree grows desperate as the Darkness spreads, threatening Ray, his friends, and all of humanity. The Wolf Tree is the second fantasy adventure book in John Claude Bemis's series The Clockwork Dark, and adds new layers of myth and magic to Bemis's original take on American tall tales in The Nine Pound Hammer.

"Isoardi has done a wonderful job collecting oral histories and integrating them into an engaging, sophisticated, and highly readable book. He provides great insight into the artistic goals, political aspirations, internal conflicts, and social terrain that shaped the experiences of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. He shows us quite clearly that jazz musicians continued to work within and gain sustenance from working class black communities long after the moment when some observers deemed the music irrelevant to them."—Eric Porter, author of What Is This Thing Called Jazz? "In these pages, Horace Tapscott says to the audience, 'This is one more you wrote through us.' And this is what Steve Isoardi has done here: given voice to the nearly lost history of a revolutionary community movement through its key players. Epic in scope, dazzling in detail and sensual as any Coltrane solo, this rare book—informative, intimate, lyrical, scholarly, nuanced, and essential—reads like no history book you've read before."—Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Becoming Abigail "The Dark Tree is just wonderful. One cannot understand the history of black arts on the West Coast without a thorough assessment of this movement; Isoardi knows this history so well, and tells a much bigger story. The book does a fantastic job of capturing the nitty gritty nature of the music scene, and of resurrecting local figures in the Arkestra who have never gotten any press for their astounding musicianship. This is a remarkable book."—Robin Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "This is a revelatory document, virtuosically combining scholarship and oral history to connect the dots of African American music on the west coast. Far more than a mere historical 'overdub' of an underdocumented scene, this book disrupts the mythic notions of jazz history, showing instead how music and community unfold as one. Both a celebratory and a cautionary tale, it also delivers some of the most frank and eye-opening musicians' accounts since Arthur Taylor's Notes and Tones."—Vijay Iyer, musician/composer, New York City

A world of dark powers and magic awaits in this dazzlingly-imagined, quest-driven epic from the author of The Rescue Princesses.

"Silver on the Tree" continues the story in Cooper's Dark Is Rising fantasy sequence in this new digest-sized edition.