An imaginative adventure for any child hoping to make a new friend, and for when a new place doesn’t yet feel like home. Elliott has just moved into a new house. He spends his days with his fictional friends, immersed in a book. When an inviting Sunday rain gathers the local kids to play in the puddles, Elliott longs to join in, but he's too shy to go outside. Soon, Elliott discovers that new friendships are like a new book—you just have to plunge into the adventure. "While a storm rages on the other side of the ship curtains at his bedroom window, Elliott buries himself in a book. A princess endlessly fights a dragon and a watercolor sea keeps 'swallowing the royal boat,' with Elliott at the helm. Later, he peeks out shyly at two puddle-jumping children on the sidewalk. 'Make some friends while I finish unpacking,' his mother urges. He joins them with a toy boat. Soon the S.S. Elliott is life-size, the puddles are an ocean and the dragon is a kite. Elliott's new house feels like home."—The New York Times Book Review, 8 Picture Books about Imagination and Identity "The imagination-fueled adventures will restore your faith in the kindness of kids"—Parents Magazine, 5 Parents-Approved Children's Books to Read Right Now “A quiet, sweet story blending common themes of moving, imagination, and friendship”—Kirkus Reviews “A gorgeous book demonstrating perfectly, with understanding and empathy, the importance of gentle encouragement to face our fears and the positive effects which result from leaping right into life and right into those glorious, rainy day puddles!”—Book Monsters “Moving may be hard, but new places can offer friendly guides to worlds of adventure, if we're brave enough to seek them out!”—Jennifer Broedel, children's author

Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

On 16 June 1957, a shoot-out in a village church in northern Lebanon leaves two dozen people dead. In the aftermath of the massacre, the town is rent in two: the Al-Ramis in the north and their rivals the Al-Samaeenis in the south. But lives once so closely intertwined cannot easily be divided. Neighbours turn into enemies and husbands and wives are forced to choose between loyalty to each other and loyalty to their clan. Drawing on an actual killing that took place in his home town, Douaihy reconstructs that June day from the viewpoints of people who witnessed the killing or whose lives were forever altered by it. A young girl overhears her father lending his gun to his cousins, but refusing to accompany them to the church. A school boy walks past the dead bodies, laid out in the town square on beds brought out from the houses. A baker whose shop is trapped on the wrong side of the line hopes the women who buy his bread will protect him. At the center of the portrait is Eliyya, who, twenty years after emigrating to the US, returns to the village to learn about the father who was shot through the heart in the massacre, the father he never knew. With a masterful eye for detail, Douaihy reconstructs that fateful June Sunday when rain poured from the sky and the traditions and affections of village life were consumed by violence and revenge.

The invention of the electric telegraph in the early forties of the nineteenth century made possible the rapid collection of the meteorological data essential to the construction of a weather chart.

The delectable new installment in the bestselling and already beloved adventures of Isabel Dalhousie and her no-nonsense housekeeper, Grace. When friends from Dallas arrive in Edinburgh and introduce Isabel to Tom Bruce – a bigwig at home in Texas – several confounding situations unfurl at once. Tom’s young fiancée’s roving eye leads Isabel to believe that money may be the root of her love for Tom. But what, Isabel wonders, is the root of the interest Tom begins to show for Isabel herself? And she can’t forget about her niece, Cat, who’s busy falling for a man whom Isabel suspects of being an incorrigible mama’s boy. Of course Grace and Isabel’s friend Jamie counsel Isabel to stay out of all of it, but there are irresistible philosophical issues at stake – when to tell the truth and when to keep one’s mouth shut, to be precise – and philosophical issues are meat and drink to Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. In any case, she’s certain of the ethical basis for a little sleuthing now and again – especially when the problems involve matters of the heart.

"Teachers, parents, kids explore more resources in the back"--Back cover.

Although her parents love walking in the rain, Baby Duck does not--until Grandpa shares a secret with her.