Little Summer gets the opportunity to spend a lot of time with her grandfather, Pop-Up. They have a lot of fun together as they experience some not-your-ordinary adventures. Summer and Pop-Up never know what’s going to happen. From shopping to fishing trips to visits to the zoo and more, the pair explore the world around them while enjoying their time together. This picture book for children shares a delightful story about the relationship between a grandpa and his granddaughter as they create special memories.

Poppy is an extraordinary young girl who loves spending time with her grandparents and Lord Ted, a truly magical teddy bear. Following a school trip to the Tower of London, Poppy and Lord Ted hear that the crown jewels have been stolen and that warder, George Featherbottom, has been kidnapped. The hunt is on for Chief Inspector Pickles-Cunningham and his team to solve the crime of the century and to return the crown jewels to the Queen. Unaware of the danger before her, Poppy soon finds herself entangled in the mystery and races to save the day.

Lucas Gillette recruited his 18 year old grandson, Mark, to accompany him on a search of a lifetime. His mother, Ruth Hayes, had left her family in Colorado, when she was just a teenager, to live with her grandparents in NY while she finished school, but for some unknown reason, she'd never returned. No one in New York knew of this family connection to Hayes, Colorado until Ruth had finally told her husband, as he lay on his death bed, that she could have family living out West. Although Lucas had tried, he'd learned very little before his mother's death, but he's determined now to find out if there could still be relatives in this small Colorado town. Their summer adventure took them across Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, and then south in Wyoming, and Colorado until they reached their destination just west of Pueblo, Colorado. Finding relatives was exciting and more wonderful than they'd ever expected. A wedding, a romance for Mark, and many other experiences of fun and surprises filled their days and evenings.The family was united and all was well at the Haven of Rest Ranch.

Fifty years ago, America spent a year that changed the world, in what was described as a nation “out of control” during the very divisive Vietnam War, with protest and tragedy on the home front between the generations as the young revolted against their elders and authority. During this tumultuous time in the history of our country, I was trying to learn some “self-awareness,” while living away from home for the first time. My story takes you on an adventurous journey of fun, recreation, and excitement in the Colorado Mountains, where I became a young adult while learning about life on my own. This true story took place in A Summer in ’68, when I spent my three-month college break working as a hotel maid at the Estes Park Chalet in beautiful Rocky Mountain National Park. At age 18, I had the opportunity to enjoy a working vacation, learning about myself with approximately fifty other college students doing the same thing. For those who couldn’t be there, come along as we go back in time to work and play in this Rocky Mountain High resort town.

Teenage Toby lived with his grandmother. When she died suddenly, arrangements were made for him to spend the summer in Dallas, Texas, with his only living relative, his uncle Mike. While waiting at the bus terminal, he noticed two kids trying to hide from a dirty, unkempt man, who smelled of booze. When the man was out of sight, Toby asked the teenage girl and her younger brother why the man was looking for them. The girl, Cindy, hesitantly explained that he was their step father, he beat their mother who was now in the hospital, and he said he would kill them for calling 911 and turning him in. They were clearly scared and Toby wanted to help if he could. Toby convinced Cindy and her brother, Tommy, to come with him to Dallas, where he was sure Uncle Mike would know what to do. There was a long wait before their bus departure time, so the three kids ran back to Cindy and Tommy's house where they quickly packed some clothes and found what money they could. Back at the bus terminal they purchased one-way tickets to Dallas, and their Summer of Adventure began.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * “Audacious…Life on the Mississippi sparkles.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A rich mix of history, reporting, and personal introspection.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch * “Both a travelogue and an engaging history lesson about America’s westward expansion.” —The Christian Science Monitor The eagerly awaited return of master American storyteller Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi is an epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure in which Buck builds a wooden flatboat from the grand “flatboat era” of the 1800s and sails it down the Mississippi River, illuminating the forgotten past of America’s first western frontier. Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts his own journey, he also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era. The role of the flatboat in our country’s evolution is far more significant than most Americans realize. Between 1800 and 1840, millions of farmers, merchants, and teenage adventurers embarked from states like Pennsylvania and Virginia on flatboats headed beyond the Appalachians to Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Settler families repurposed the wood from their boats to build their first cabins in the wilderness; cargo boats were broken apart and sold to build the boomtowns along the water route. Joining the river traffic were floating brothels, called “gun boats”; “smithy boats” for blacksmiths; even “whiskey boats” for alcohol. In the present day, America’s inland rivers are a superhighway dominated by leviathan barges—carrying $80 billion of cargo annually—all descended from flatboats like the ramshackle Patience. As a historian, Buck resurrects the era’s adventurous spirit, but he also challenges familiar myths about American expansion, confronting the bloody truth behind settlers’ push for land and wealth. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes to travel the Mississippi on a brutal journey en route to the barrens of Oklahoma. Simultaneously, almost a million enslaved African Americans were carried in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles over the Appalachians to the cotton and cane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, birthing the term “sold down the river.” Buck portrays this watershed era of American expansion as it was really lived. With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, Life on the Mississippi is a mus­cular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.