John "Spud" Sweetgrass tries to find out who has been dumping rancid cooking oil into the storm drain at a polluted beach, and a troublesome teacher meets an ironic fate. Reprint.

Spud Sweetgrass Spud gets angry when he sees Dumper Stubbs, a creepy delivery man, dumping oil into a storm drain and causing terrible pollution in the river. When Spud blows the whistle, he loses his job. Enlisting the help of his buddy, Dink the Thinker, and Connie Pan, Spud thinks he has a chance of regaining his job . . . and stopping the Dumper's harmful activities. Spud in Winter Spud Sweetgrass and his friends Connie Pan and Dink the Thinker are back. And this time Spud is in some frigid trouble. One morning Spud sees a terrible crime. And he can't get it out of his mind. Detective Kennedy wants him to tell her what he saw, but he's afraid of the man with the most beautiful hair in the world -- afraid for himself, and afraid for Connie Pan.

After witnessing a murder on the coldest day of the year, Spud Sweetgrass becomes the target of both Detective Kennedy of the police department and the murderer himself. Reprint.

Children’s books seek to assist children to understand themselves and their world. Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature demonstrates how settler-society texts position child readers as citizens of postcolonial nations, how they represent the colonial past to modern readers, what they propose about race relations, and how they conceptualize systems of power and government. Clare Bradford focuses on texts produced since 1980 in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand and includes picture books, novels, and films by Indigenous and non-Indigenous publishers and producers. From extensive readings, the author focuses on key works to produce a thorough analysis rather than a survey. Unsettling Narratives opens up an area of scholarship and discussion—the use of postcolonial theories—relatively new to the field of children’s literature and demonstrates that many texts recycle the colonial discourses naturalized within mainstream cultures.

Unique in its coverage of contemporary American children's literature, this timely, single-volume reference covers the books our children are--or should be--reading now, from board books to young adult novels. Enriched with dozens of color illustrations and the voices of authors and illustrators themselves, it is a cornucopia of delight. 23 color, 153 b&w illustrations.

Hearing All the Voices is a tremendous resource for any adult who works with middle school aged adolescents. This work annotates over 500 multicultural books and gives ideas on how to group the books and use the books with students both in and out of the classroom.

Children's publishing is a huge international industry and there is ever-growing interest from researchers and students in the genre as cultural object of study and tool for education and socialization.