An aging bootlegger from the Prohibition Era, a recovering addict who seeks meaning in his life and a teenager alienated from everything his father stands for unite in an effort to map a healthy transition to adulthood for the youngest of the three.

“Calling to mind such widely disparate writers as Mark Twain, Andre Norton and Peter Dickinson, Stevermer paints a realistic ruin of society.” —Publishers Weekly The award-winning author of the Scholarly Magic series delivers the thrilling adventure of a crew of young kids working their way through a post-apocalyptic world on a steamboat they call home . . . No one knows for sure what caused the Flash. They just know that nothing has been the same since. Cities have been destroyed by pestilence, riots, and fires. The paddleboat River Rat, once a museum, was turned into an orphanage. But a dangerous storm forced the children to flee with the boat to safer waters, making it theirs for good. Since then, Tomcat, Toby, Esteban, Lindy, Spike, and Jake have traveled, bartered, and performed their way up and down the Mississippi River. One rule that has served them well: no passengers. But after watching a man on shore being pursued by a vicious pack of locals, the group has no choice but to save him. At every stop, the boat is met by the man’s tireless hunters. They want what the fugitive knows: the location of a bunker filled with guns. A currency more valuable than gold . . . and one that the crew of the River Rat might well pay for—with their lives. “An unusual, compelling futuristic novel . . . wry, sharp, lively, and perceptive.” —The Horn Book (starred review) “Too good to miss.” —Booklist An ALA Best Book for Young Adults A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age

The United States Navys fight for control of the waters of Southeast Asia. By far the greatest contribution of the narrative is the insight it provides into the hows and whys of United States involvement in Vietnam, and the attempt of that involvement to bring freedom to those who were unable to achieve it by their own efforts. We see the United States more as a caretaker and less as a policeman in terms of motivation for its involvement half a world away. Andwe see the tremendous price paid by those who served to ensure that freedom ordinary men who, by fate, were thrown together in a strange land, and who fulfilled a part of their destiny, and their Nations, on the brown water. Weldon Bleiler

The Deptford Mice and their allies rush once again into battle with old enemies, grown much more powerful, as a devastatingly cold winter threatens to keep the Green Mouse from returning in the spring.

** On Sale! ★★★★★ "I've read almost 1,000 books and this one is at the top" - Amazon Reviewer ★★★★★ "It's like I have a mini-movie playing in my head" - Amazon Reviewer ★★★★★ "A book that I can let my children read also. Please keep writing" - Amazon Reviewer Being the best isn't always a good thing. Desperate to become the youngest warrior of his clan, Ayrion will stop at nothing to reach his goal, not even the one thing all Upakans fear... ... Magic. However, when a fatal accident forces him to flee, Ayrion barters passage aboard the only ship willing to take one of his kind...A Cursed Ship. With nothing but the clothes on his back, Ayrion sets sail for the royal city of Aramoor in hopes of making a name for himself. Little does he know how deadly those streets can be. Life doesn't always hand you what you want, sometimes you have to take it. Street Rats of Aramoor Book 1: Banished Book 2: Hurricane Book 3: Rockslide Book 4: Sandstorm Book 5: Wildfire Book 6: Avalanche The Aldoran Chronicles Book 1: The White Tower Book 2: Plague of Shadows Book 3: The Four-Part Key Book 4: The Tunnels Beneath

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.