Water Street

Somethings not right at number 56 Water Street. From the sidewalk in front of the abandoned house, ten-year-old best friends Derek and Ravine watch lights flicker on and off, again and again. When they race home to tell their parents, theyre in for a shock: there is no house at 56 Water Street! The house is invisible to everyone but Derek and Ravine, and the ghost haunting the old place wants to get their attention. Trapped for more than a hundred years, Isabel Roberts needs to solve the mystery of her younger sisters fate before she can truly rest in peace. And shes chosen Derek and Ravine to help her. When the two friends summon the courage to venture inside the house, theyre unprepared for what they find (after all, meeting a ghost face-to-face isnt exactly normal) and for the spine-tingling adventures in store for them. But Derek and Ravine are determined to help Isabel. If they dont, she could be a ghost forever!

"Elizabeth Dulemba seamlessly melds a coming-of-age story to the reality of life in a single-industry town. This is a book that sings." — Betsy Bird, School Library Journal blog A Fuse #8 Production Living in Coppertown is like living on the moon. Everything is bare—there are no trees, no birds, no signs of nature at all. And while Jack loves his town, he hates the dangerous mines that have ruined the land with years of pollution. When the miners go on strike and the mines are forced to close, Jack's life-long wish comes true: the land has the chance to heal. But not everyone in town is happy about the change. Without the mines, Jack's dad is out of work and the family might have to leave Coppertown. Just when new life begins to creep back into town, Jack might lose his friends, his home, and everything he's ever known. Dulemba paints a vivid picture of life in the Appalachia in this beautiful story about a boy looking for new beginnings while struggling to hold on to the things he loves most.

Brooklyn, 1875: Bird Mallon lives on Water Street where you can see the huge towers of the bridge to Manhattan being built. Bird wants nothing more in life than to be brave enough to be a healer, like her mother, Nory, to help her sister Annie find love, and to convince her brother, Hughie, to stop fighting for money with his street gang. And of course, she wishes that a girl would move into the empty apartment upstairs so that she can have a new friend close by. But Thomas Neary and his Pop move in upstairs. Thomas who writes about his life in his journal--his father who spends each night at the Tavern down the street, the mother he wishes he had, and the Mallon family downstairs that he desperately wants to be a part of. Thomas, who has a secret that only Bird suspects, and who turns out to be the best friend Bird could ever have.

The residents of Water Street are hardworking, God-fearing people who live in a seemingly safe and insulated neighborhood within a small Kentucky town: "Water Street is a place where mothers can turn their backs to flip a pancake or cornmeal hoecake on the stove and know our children are safe." But all is not as it seems as the secret lives of neighbors and friends are revealed in interconnected tales of love, loss, truth, and tragedy. In this critically acclaimed short story collection, Crystal Wilkinson peels back the intricate layers that form the fabric of this community and its inhabitants -- revealing emotionally raw, multifaceted tales of race, class, gender, mental illness, and interpersonal relationships. The thirteen succinct stories offer fragmented glimpses of an overarching narrative that emerges, lyrical and fierce. Featuring a new foreword and a new afterword which illuminate Wilkinson's artistic achievement, this captivating work is poised to delight a new generation of readers.

The staggering story of an unlikely band of mothers in the 1970s who discovered Hooker Chemical's deadly secret of Love Canal—exposing one of America’s most devastating toxic waste disasters and sparking the modern environmental movement as we know it today. “Propulsive...A mighty work of historical journalism...A glorious quotidian thriller about people forced to find and use their inner strength.” —The Boston Globe Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their neighborhood on the east side of Niagara Falls. It had an elementary school, a playground, and rows of affordable homes. But in the spring of 1977, pungent odors began to seep into these little houses, and it didn’t take long for worried mothers to identify the curious scent. It was the sickly sweet smell of chemicals. In this propulsive work of narrative storytelling, NYT journalist Keith O’Brien uncovers how Gibbs and Kenny exposed the poisonous secrets buried in their neighborhood. The school and playground had been built atop an old canal—Love Canal, it was called—that Hooker Chemical, the city’s largest employer, had quietly filled with twenty thousand tons of toxic waste in the 1940s and 1950s. This waste was now leaching to the surface, causing a public health crisis the likes of which America had never seen before and sparking new and specific fears. Luella Kenny believed the chemicals were making her son sick. O’Brien braids together previously unknown stories of Hooker Chemical’s deeds; the local newspaperman, scientist, and congressional staffer who tried to help; the city and state officials who didn’t; and the heroic women who stood up to corporate and governmental indifference to save their families and their children. They would take their fight all the way to the top, winning support from the EPA, the White House, and even President Jimmy Carter. By the time it was over, they would capture America’s imagination. Sweeping and electrifying, Paradise Falls brings to life a defining story from our past, laying bare the dauntless efforts of a few women who—years before Erin Brockovich took up the mantle— fought to rescue their community and their lives from the effects of corporate pollution and laid foundation for the modern environmental movement as we know it today.