When Rain Falls

A colorful look at the amazing ways animals behave and interact with their environments on a rainy day. We go inside when the rain comes down, but where do animals go? This engaging book for young readers offers a first glimpse at how different animals in different habitats behave during a thunderstorm. Acclaimed children's nonfiction author Melissa Stewart takes a lyrical look at the behavior of animals in forests, fields, wetlands, and deserts and briefly describes how each creature interacts with its rained-soaked environment. Constance Bergum's soft watercolor paintings colorfully depict the animals and special features of each habitat.

Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling is a tough-as-nails account of being down and out, but never down for good—a Dostoyevskian tale of crime, punishment, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive redemption. The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary confinement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class—married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But neither Jack nor Billy can escape their troubled pasts, and they will meet again in San Quentin before their strange double drama comes to a violent and revelatory end.

Tom Call is a young Wyoming sheriff running the murder investigation of a young girl in mid-1941. But the case is disrupted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Tom joins the U.S. Air Force and is deployed to England to fly bombers, where he tries to continue his investigation of the murder.

The soldiers came with the storm. Our people didn’t stand a chance. But we were lucky. Under darkening skies, a group of teens must fight to survive a war no one saw coming. Their families are taken. The citizens, imprisoned. As they hide in the thick native bush they begin to realize they’re alone—no help is coming. In their never-ending struggle for freedom, one question remains: Who started this war? They must discover the truth before war’s fingers reach farther afield.

It's 1998, and Jim Diffin is a charming, reckless, college sophomore with a unique moral code, a crew of wild friends, and no interest in serious relationships. That is, until he meets Diana Huntington, a precocious teenager who doesn't fall for him so easily and embodies everything he's ever wanted. The longer they date, the more her cool aloofness entrances him. His friends, a memorably eclectic mix of social outcasts offer no shortage of dubious advice and the usual relief of tea with his mother will lose its typical solace once he learns she has worse troubles herself. And while comforting his mother, weighing the insights of his friends, and agonizing over Diana, his mindset opens to a new way, but can his compassion, patience and burgeoning enlightenment ever win him the girl? In the course of The Way Rain Falls, blind hope and frenzied despair send Jim careening from candle-lit dinners to street fights, intimate camp-outs to a drug fueled road trip to Canada, and an indiscretion Jim may never live down.

After Rain Falls is BOOK TWO OF TWO in the River of Rain Duet. In order to understand the contents of this book, you must read Follow the River first. This is the conclusion of River and Rain's story.Love has never been important to me. Not because I didn't want it, I just never imagined feeling something so powerful.There was a point where I thought I felt it years ago for the person I trusted most in the world, only to have it shatter in a thousand pieces.But now he's back in my life and I'm certain I was wrong.Because nothing compares to the way I feel about River Lennox. Nothing could have prepared me for the war we waged against one another to turn into a battle to not only find ourselves, but each other.Our prison sentence became our sanctuary from anything-or anyone-who dared to rip us apart.He crawled under my skin, into my heart, and made a home for himself there despite my efforts to stop him.But it doesn't matter now. Not when I find myself being thrown into a chess game I never asked to play with decisions forced on me that no one should have to make.It's not just life and death.It's love and hate.The past and the future.Except...when my past comes knocking with a thirst for vengeance, I start to question if I have a future at all.

This lyrical tour of a variety of habitats offers young readers vivid glimpses of animals as they live out the hot season under the blazing sun. When the sun is shining brightly, people put on sunscreen or scurry inside to cool off. But how do wild animals react to the sizzling heat? Journey from your neighborhood to a field where an earthworm loops its long body into a ball underground, to a desert where a jackrabbit loses heat through its oversized ears, to a wetland where a siren salamander burrows into the mud to stay cool, and to a seashore where a sea star hides in the shade of a seaweed mat. Constance R. Bergum's glowing watercolors perfectly capture the wonder of a hot, sunny environment.

Discusses the similarities and differences between the forms of precipitation: rain, snow, and hail.