Eve gave up her belief in stories and magic after her mother's death, but a mysterious birthday present takes her and a boy who claims to be a ghost on a strange journey, to where their supposedly cursed town flourishes.

Fiction. Women's Studies. Eve Gates is intent on finding a way to fly away from the small town where her millworker family lives a wary existence and where her best friend meets tragedy. Tired of battling her loving but close-mouthed mother, Maisie, for details about Evangeline, the grandmother who died before Eve was born, and whose death seems to be the heart of the mystery that swirls around her family, Eve heads for New York, for Paris, for all the places she has conjured through her love of reading only to be called back due to family illnesses. Now she must decide whether she will settle back into her old home town or move into the larger world she has always craved. If she stays, can a romance in a small- minded community provide a large- enough window on life? If she goes, will she ever resolve the mystery that her mother and aunts guard so closely? The path forward lies through a search for the friend she thought was lost forever, and by connecting with the grandmother she never knew."

This book is a fun way for new readers to learn the sound of long e. The book tells a simple story that highlights the sound of long e. Controlled vocabulary, engaging text and colorful illustrations help young readers begin a lifelong love of reading.

A provocative new interpretation of the Adam and Eve story from an expert in Biblical literature. The Garden of Eden story, one of the most famous narratives in Western history, is typically read as an ancient account of original sin and humanity’s fall from divine grace. In this highly innovative study, Ziony Zevit argues that this is not how ancient Israelites understood the early biblical text. Drawing on such diverse disciplines as biblical studies, geography, archaeology, mythology, anthropology, biology, poetics, law, linguistics, and literary theory, he clarifies the worldview of the ancient Israelite readers during the First Temple period and elucidates what the story likely meant in its original context. Most provocatively, he contends that our ideas about original sin are based upon misconceptions originating in the Second Temple period under the influence of Hellenism. He shows how, for ancient Israelites, the story was really about how humans achieved ethical discernment. He argues further that Adam was not made from dust and that Eve was not made from Adam’s rib. His study unsettles much of what has been taken for granted about the story for more than two millennia—and has far-reaching implications for both literary and theological interpreters. “Classical Hebrew in the hands of Ziony Zevit is like a cello in the hands of a master cellist. He knows all the hidden subtleties of the instrument, and he makes you hear them in this rendition of the profoundly simple story of Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and their Creator in the Garden of Eden. Zevit brings a great deal of other biblical learning to bear in a surprisingly light-hearted book.”―Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

Helped by her father, a young girl prepares a flower garden as a birthday surprise for her mother.