Twelve-year-old Darby loves living on her family's strawberry farm. But a big storm is coming, and it threatens to destroy everything she and her family hold dear. Darby is twelve years old and has Down syndrome. Her favorite things are music, chocolate, and her big sister Kaydee. It's a big weekend for Darby. It's time for their annual chocolate hunt, and it's all she can think about. Well, that and spending time with her big sister. But this year Kaydee's friend Lissa is staying over for the weekend, and she seems to be stealing all of Kaydee's attention. And to make things worse, the strawberry farm is hit by a tornado. Suddenly, it's as though both the chocolate hunt and her sister are slipping away from her. Although the family is prepared for the tornado, they aren't prepared for the storm of emotions that surface when a truth is brought to light. With tension rising within the family, can Darby mend what's been broken when it seems like no one is listening to her? A Storm of Strawberries is a warm, thoughtful, and empathetic novel from acclaimed author Jo Cotterill.

Engage Literacy is the new reading scheme from Raintree that introduces engaging and contemporary content to motivate and support early readers while providing a reliable and instructional framework. All titles are precisely levelled, with new vocabulary being introduced and reinforced throughout the levels. This is a level 21 fiction title in the Gold book band level.

Is the gold real, or is Pat on a fool's errand? It's January 1986, and Pat Kowalski has just turned 18, but there's no cause for celebration. His father is dying, and the local bank is foreclosing on their house. Pat talks to his senile great-grandmother, who tells him a story about a man dying in front of her in 1894. What she doesn't tell him is that the man – Mister Good Boots - had been carrying a suitcase worth of gold coins. These coins would be worth a fortune today – if any of them are still left. But Pat's not the only person in their small Central Illinois town who needs money. Pat's classmate Vince is watching his college dream evaporate. Vince has also convinced himself that Pat's family stole something of great value from his family in the 1920s. He's willing to do whatever it takes to right an old wrong. Vince has another advantage – Pat doesn't know Vince is looking. The two men are both trying to figure out if there's any gold left and, if so, where it is. While they look, they discover a lot about their own history, from bodies buried under an abandoned restaurant to both family's relationships with Al Capone. It's a race where the winner gets the gold, and the loser gets a bullet.

Taking on the neglected issue of the short story's relationship to literary Modernism, Claire Drewery examines works by Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf. Drewery argues that the short story as a genre is preoccupied with transgressing boundaries, and thus offers an ideal platform from which to examine the Modernist fascination with the liminal. Embodying both liberation and restriction, liminal spaces on the one hand enable challenges to traditional cultural and personal identities, while on the other hand they entail the inevitable negative consequences of occupying the position of the outsider: marginality, psychosis, and death. Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf all exploit this paradox in their short fiction, which typically explores literal and psychological borderline states that are resistant to rational analysis. Thus, their short stories offered these authors an opportunity to represent the borders of unconsciousness and to articulate meaning while also conveying a sense of that which is unsayable. Through their concern with liminality, Drewery shows, these writers contribute significantly to the Modernist aesthetic that interrogates identity, the construction of the self, and the relationship between the individual and society.