Grade level: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, p, e, i.

In lyrical prose and black-and-white photographs, Lasky's book depicts the Lacey family of Vermont making maple syrup. --School Library Journal

Nora and Gramp are collecting sap from maple trees to make maple syrup. The horses, Bonnie and Stella, are working hard, too, pulling the heavy sap tank through the snow from tree to tree. This third story about Nora and her grandparents brings the beautyof a Vermont farm in early spring vividly to life.

Sugaring is the act of collecting maple sap to make maple syrup, an early-spring endeavor that takes place in the Midwest and Northeast United States, and in neighboring areas in Canada. It is a time-honored tradition with Native Americans origins. Sugaring is a beautifully rendered narrative about this soulful activity that slows down time. Interspersed throughout the book's lyrical story are instructions to guide the novice sugarer through every stage of sugaring, from selecting trees and hanging sap buckets to finishing off the syrup. For anyone with an interest in taking up sugaring, everyone who has a maple tree, and all those with nostalgia for the rural landscape, Sugaring will be a joy to discover.

The year in 1968 and idealistic anti-war activists David and Jill have moved to an abandoned hill farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom to start a commune-hoping to refocus their efforts to build a new society. Joined by a rotating cast of committed activists and fairweather freeloaders alike, David and Jill are confronted by the harsh environment of northern Vermont, where they discover the complexity of country life, make connections with their new neighbors (good and bad), and struggle to find their place until the fissures blowing apart the larger anti-war movement reach their collective at Zion Farm. Sugaring Down burrows below the surface of sixties counterculture and the New Left to explore the contradictions and passions that lead to the implosion of the protagonists' dreams, and their turns down two very different paths. "When I read Dan Chodorkoff's historically vivid Vermont novel, I thought of Faulkner's famous statement: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' Sugaring Down takes place in the turbulent 60's, when the Vietnam war was malignantly in our communal hearts and minds. But Chodorkoff's story is also about the friendships and fateful decisions we made in our flurried passions, at the same time hauntingly sensed that we may never again feel quite so alive." -Howard Norman, author of The Ghost Clause

A year in the life of one New England family as they work to preserve an ancient, lucrative, and threatened agricultural art--the sweetest harvest, maple syrup . . . How has one of America's oldest agricultural crafts evolved from a quaint enterprise with "sugar parties" and the delicacy "sugar on snow" to a modern industry? At a sugarhouse owned by maple syrup entrepreneur Bruce Bascom, 80,000 gallons of sap are processed daily during winter's end. In The Sugar Season, Douglas Whynott follows Bascom through one tumultuous season, taking us deep into the sugarbush, where sunlight and sap are intimately related and the sound of the taps gives the woods a rhythm and a ring. Along the way, he reveals the inner workings of the multimillion-dollar maple sugar industry. Make no mistake, it's big business -- complete with a Maple Hall of Fame, a black market, a major syrup heist monitored by Homeland Security, a Canadian organization called The Federation, and a Global Strategic Reserve that's comparable to OPEC (fitting, since a barrel of maple syrup is worth more than a barrel of oil). Whynott brings us to sugarhouses, were we learn the myriad subtle flavors of syrup and how it's assigned a grade. He examines the unusual biology of the maple tree that makes syrup possible and explores the maples' -- and the industry's -- chances for survival, highlighting a hot-button issue: how global warming is threatening our food supply. Experts predict that, by the end of this century, maple syrup production in the United States may suffer a drastic decline. As buckets and wooden spouts give way to vacuum pumps and tubing, we see that even the best technology can't overcome warm nights in the middle of a season--and that only determined men like Bascom can continue to make a sweet like off of rugged land./DIV

Ethan eagerly anticipates making maple syrup with his father, but it will not be time until the days are warmer, the nights shorter, and Ethan's loose tooth falls out.