Born around the turn of the century, Opal Whiteley spent her childhood on the American Western frontier. Through these excerpts from her diary, readers are given a taste of the struggle and despair as well as the faith and joy felt in each moment of her life. An IRA Teacher's Choice Book. 6/97.

Self-published book of poems by a young author whose childhood diary had caused a sensation three years earlier upon its publication in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in spring 1920, and subsequently as a book. Whiteley's childhood record of growing up in the woods in a logging town in Oregon was painstakingly pieced back together from its torn fragments and is still controversial as to its true origins. Shortly after publication, it was claimed that she wrote the diary as an adult, not a child, and it was branded a hoax. She died in a mental hospital in London in 1992 where she had been institutionalized since 1948.

Taoist philosophy explained using examples from A A Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.

When Jerome Kildee, a solitary man, builds a home in a redwood forest in California, he takes in some skunks and raccoons, but as they begin to multiply, Kildee looks to two human neighbors for help.

From her classic novel LITTLE WOMEN, Louisa May Alcott's energetic and androgynous character Jo March has inspired generations of tomboys, but eventually Jo submitted to the role of wife and mother. Here an assortment of women writers push the tomboy narrative beyond the boundaries of children's literature to reveal the determined tomboy spirit and the variety of paths taken by real life tomboys as they navigate adolescence and adulthood.