All around the world in cities, towns and villages—large and small—clothes are washed. They are hung to dry in the breeze and sunshine and children everywhere revel in the fun of helping with the laundry. Smelling Sunshine captures some of the special moments of this day-to-day chore—a wonderful, heart-warming time shared between parent and child and an experience young readers will relate to.

Lake of Heaven is the story of a traditional mountain village in Japan that is destroyed in the process of constructing a dam. It tells of the lives of the displaced villagers as they struggle to retain their traditional culture_including their stories, dances, music, mythology, and dreams_in the face of displacement, environmental destruction, and rapid modernization. Although fictional, the work is rooted in the events of actual villages in the mountains of Kyushu and Ishimure's imaginative reconstructions of their people's tales. Lake of Heaven considerably stretches the familiar Western conceptions of the novel form. Its interweaving of local stories, dreams, and myths lends it a deep sense of the Noh Drama. Gary Snyder writes that Lake of Heaven is 'a remarkable text of mythopoetic quality_with a Noh flavor_that presents much of the ancient lore of Japan and the lore of the spirit world.' The story becomes a parable for the larger world, 'in which all of our old cultures and all of our old villages are becoming buried, sunken, and lost under the rising waters of the dams of industrialization and globalization.'

Wade Rule reveals to his classmate Maria that he plans to run off to Vermont to escape his domineering mother. When Maria tells him she'd rather run off than live with her father, Wade makes up his mind to take Maria along. But when he shows up at school with a shotgun to fetch her, things go horribly wrong.