Here are 100 books that Operation Redwood fans have personally recommended if you like
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I live in a small town in rural Maine. My land has a farm pond, big pine trees, fields, and a crabapple orchard that blooms every spring. The air smells wonderful, and the night sky is big and mysterious. It is also less than five miles from the biggest commercial landfill in Maine, owned by the largest waste management company in the world. This landfill takes garbage not only from Maine but from many other states. In 1989, it was the site of a catastrophic landfill collapse. This has made me appreciate books that address the complexities of environmental activism and that remind me how we are all living on this same fragile planet.
I love a book that makes me laugh out loud, and this book did that many times!
Despite the serious underlying topic of eco preservation, this story is truly funny, with so many unexpected twists. There's not just alligators, burrowing owls, and poisonous snakes!
The main character, Roy Eberhardt, is the kind of person anyone would be lucky to have as a friend. And Beatrice and her step-brother are also both characters I cheered for.
6
authors picked
Hoot
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
12,
13,
14, and
15.
What is this book about?
This Newbery Honor winner and #1 New York Times bestseller is a beloved modern classic. Hoot features a new kid and his new bully, alligators, some burrowing owls, a renegade eco-avenger, and several extremely poisonous snakes.
Everybody loves Mother Paula's pancakes. Everybody, that is, except the colony of cute but endangered owls that live on the building site of the new restaurant. Can the awkward new kid and his feral friend prank the pancake people out of town? Or is the owls' fate cemented in pancake batter?
Welcome to Carl Hiaasen's Florida—where the creatures are wild and the people are…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I have been privileged to see a penguin chick running to its parent for a meal, a blue-footed booby couple doing a mating dance, a cheetah racing across the savannah, and a whale spouting out at sea. I am committed to do what I can to preserve natural habitats and limit the effect humans have on the environment. As a teacher, librarian, and author, I encourage and laud kids who want to protect our world. It is a joy to be involved with books that are models for enthusiastic youngsters.
With my fascination for whales, I was taken by Gold's book.
Rio, who lives in London, is sent to California to be with his grandmother, while his violinist mother recovers from a breakdown. Everything is alien to Rio. Gradually, he begins to notice the migrating gray whales.
With his new friend, Marina, and her father, who runs a tourist boat, Rio becomes intrigued with one whale in particular, White Beak. They track White Beak, until suddenly, there's no trace of her. Rio and Marina, concerned that she has gotten entangled in fishing nets, are determined to locate her.
Their strong resolve leads them further out to sea and into a deep involvement with White Beak.
The Lost Whale is the enchanting second novel from the author of The Last Bear: the bestselling debut hardback of 2021 and The Times Children's Book of the Week, winner of the Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Award and shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Indie Book Awards 2022
'Unforgettable highly accomplished animal adventure about the connection between a boy and a whale, with strong ecological themes' The Bookseller, Editor's Choice
What if you could communicate with a whale?
Rio has been sent to live with a grandmother he barely knows in California, while his…
I have been privileged to see a penguin chick running to its parent for a meal, a blue-footed booby couple doing a mating dance, a cheetah racing across the savannah, and a whale spouting out at sea. I am committed to do what I can to preserve natural habitats and limit the effect humans have on the environment. As a teacher, librarian, and author, I encourage and laud kids who want to protect our world. It is a joy to be involved with books that are models for enthusiastic youngsters.
How better to get kids involved with our world than a sensitive picture book for the younger set?
A young boy goes hiking with his mom across a desert area and down into a canyon. He notices all sorts of wonderful sights and sounds from the crunching of his boots on the stones to the horned lizard tracks, the road runner snatching a rattlesnake, and the riot of wildflowers of a desert in bloom.
The illustrations, in their soft desert tones, are evocative and have just the pertinent detail that allows the reader to identify each new discovery.
In this latest book in the acclaimed Over and Under series, a spectacular hike reveals the hidden wonders, rich colors, and layers of wildlife living within a thriving desert slot-canyon.
Over and Under the Canyon takes young readers on a thrilling tour of a desert canyon ecosystem. Over the canyon, the sun scalds the air, baking desert mud to stone. But under the shade of the cliffs hides another world, where bighorn sheep bound from rock to rock on the hillside, roadrunners make their nests in sturdy cacti, and banded geckos tuck themselves into the shelter of the sand. Discover…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I have been privileged to see a penguin chick running to its parent for a meal, a blue-footed booby couple doing a mating dance, a cheetah racing across the savannah, and a whale spouting out at sea. I am committed to do what I can to preserve natural habitats and limit the effect humans have on the environment. As a teacher, librarian, and author, I encourage and laud kids who want to protect our world. It is a joy to be involved with books that are models for enthusiastic youngsters.
Dolphin Rescueis a story for 7-9-year-olds about siblings, Maddie & Atticus, who live in a coastal town in Maine.
They love nature and are very ecologically aware. While trying to solve the mystery of household trash scattered on lawns in their neighborhood, they help a pod of dolphins in trouble because of a tangle of fishing line.
I enjoyed the interesting facts and lovely photos about the area and the nearby waters.
Siblings Maddie and Atticus love living by the sea. Their dad traps lobsters off the coast of Maine. They love helping with the family business and volunteering at the local aquarium. The summer is shaping up to be a super one, for sure. Then one day they spy a pod of dolphins in the cove looking distressed. How will the kids use their knowledge of animals and their awesome problem-solving skills to help the dolphin family get safely back to sea?
Perfect for reluctant, challenged, and newly fluent readers, the Animal Planet Adventures chapter book series combines fun animal mysteries…
I started climbing and running around the hills in my teens, got into boats, became a professional sailor for twenty years, then took up surfing at thirty and snowboarding at forty. There’s something special about playing with gravity, whether it’s sliding down hills or waves, or defying it on a mountain face. All these books capture the thrill and the dangers.
I discovered this book when I had just started surfing, and it blew me away – so there could be great fiction about extreme sports! I loved the grittiness, the foreboding noir feel, and the unusual setting. It was part of the inspiration for Powder Burn, although they are very different books.
Heart Attacks is California's last secret spot - the premier mysto surf haunt, the stuff of rumour and legend. The rumours say you must cross Indian land to get there. They tell of hostile locals and shark-infested waters where waves in excess of thirty feet break a mile from shore. For down-and-out photographer Jack Fletcher, the chance to shoot these waves in the company of surfing legend Drew Harmon offers the promise of new beginnings. But Drew is not alone in the northern reaches of the state. His young wife, Kendra, lives there with him. Obsessed with the unsolved murder…
My favorite books are funny/sad. In my own writing, I aspire for balance between satire and sympathy, going to dark places and shining a light of hilarity on them. I’m compelled by the psychological complexities of desire, particularly in female characters—flawed, average women, struggling for empowerment. For me, desire is inextricably bound with loss. I’m inspired by loss both superficial and profound, from misplaced keys to dying fathers. Many voices clamor in my head, vying for my attention. I’m interested in ambitious misfits, enraged neurotics, pagans, shamans, healers, dealers, grifters, and spiritual seekers who are forced to adapt, construct, reinvent and contort themselves as reality shifts around them.
This book is brilliant and heartbreaking. I’ve read everything by Gabrielle Bell. I marvel at her artistry, her linework, her drawing and composition and incisive visual storytelling. If I sound like a fangirl it’s because I am. Everything is Flammable is a dark, funny, brutal, honest story, full of heart and originality. When Gabrielle’s mother loses everything in a fire, Gabrielle uproots her east coast life and heads west to rural California to help. But she has her own issues, and the trip pulls her back to her semi-feral childhood as she and her mother try to build a new home on top of the ashes. It’s a searing examination of a mother-daughter love, with illuminating artwork, immediate and poignant visuals, and mordant observations.
"Bell's pen becomes a kind of laser, first illuminating the surface distractions of the world, then scorching them away to reveal a deeper reality that is almost too painful and too beautiful to bear."-- Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, Are You My Mother In Gabrielle Bell's much anticipated graphic memoir, she returns from New York to her childhood town in rural Northern California after her mother's home is destroyed by a fire. Acknowledging her issues with anxiety, financial hardships, memories of a semi-feral childhood, and a tenuous relationship with her mother, Bell helps her mother put together a new home on…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
I have been fascinated with the sixties and its counterculture ever since I was about eleven or twelve, and I found out that the summer I was born, 1967, was called the Summer of Love. Because of this fascination, I started reading writers like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson at an early age. Then, I became a lover of the Grateful Dead and went on tour with them as a fan for a couple of years in my late teens. It was the best way remaining in this country, in the 1980s, to be a hippie in some real way. I still love the music and literature of that time.
This heavy, sardonic novel about a commune of hippies whose utopian dream is rapidly fraying kept me totally compelled and frequently laughing all the way through.
They find land in Alaska and try to move their scene to the great North, but the realities of weather and wilderness don’t conform to their plans.
It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier-the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska-in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naive optimism, the inhabitants of "Drop City" arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other young homesteaders. When the two communities collide, unexpected friendships and dangerous enmities are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment, and a roof over one's head. Rich,…
I’ve written and published one hundred very short ghost stories, plus a handful of longer ones, and have spent a lifetime reading and watching and thinking about stories of ghosts and the afterlife. My expertise, such as it is, involves ghosts as beings of narrative and metaphor. I’ve encountered great numbers of them on the page and on the screen—nowhere else—but I confess that I would love someday (though don’t expect) to encounter them in the flesh. My flesh, that is to say; their fleshlessness.
This, Dorst’s first novel, adopts the trappings of a police procedural but is at heart a character drama seasoned with elements of the supernatural. It follows the fortunes of a rookie cop in the “cemetery city” of Colma, California, whose charges, he quickly discovers, include both the living and the dead. Recommended if you like your ghosts eerie and your human beings haunted not only by wakeful spirits but by their own personal blunders and false starts.
A "dark and funny debut"(Seattle-Times) about a young police officer struggling to maintain a sense of reality in a town where the dead outnumber the living.
Colma, California, the "cemetery city" serving San Francisco, is the resting place of the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst. It is also the home of Michael Mercer, a by-the-book rookie cop struggling to settle comfortably into adult life. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of his predecessor, Sergeant Wes Featherstone, who spent his last years policing the dead as well as the living. As Mercer attempts to…
I have long been fascinated by how personal and singular the experience of grief is. There is something soothing and relatable about reading others’ experiences—the more strange, nonsensical, or even supernatural the better. My own novel, The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn, is a retelling of The Secret Garden, but with an adult protagonist moving through grief over the death of her complicated mother, striving to see a bright ray of hope on the other side. Each of the books on my list about unusual manifestations of grief tackles this same concept in new and surprising ways, and I hope they touch you as they have touched me.
Don’t let the YA tag dissuade you if you don’t generally read books for that audience; Watch Over Me has definite appeal for an adult crowd.
The main character is an 18-year-old young woman who has aged out of foster care and is searching for her place in the world. A ghost-story-that-isn’t-a-ghost-story, Watch Over Me is a book about confronting our own ghosts—literally and figuratively.
La Cour’s arresting prose seamlessly inserts the speculative elements into an exploration of recovery from guilt and grief in a way I found breathtaking.
A modern ghost story about trauma and survival, Watch Over Me is the much-anticipated new novel from the Printz Award-winning author of We Are Okay
"Gripping; an emotion-packed must-read." -Kirkus, starred review "A painfully compelling gem from a masterful creator." -Booklist, starred review "Moving, unsettling, and full of atmospheric beauty." -SLJ, starred review
Mila is used to being alone.
Maybe that's why she said yes. Yes to a second chance in this remote place, among the flowers and the fog and the crash of waves far below.
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I love the mystery and wisdom of wolves. When I began researching wolves to write my own wolf stories, I discovered they had not only keen instincts but shocking intuition. I read stacks of nonfiction books on wolves and wolf stories, too. I toured a wolf conservation. One of the wolves, a white wolf, looked me straight in the eye and held me there. A wolf’s eyes do more than see you. Her communication was almost a prayer. I went home and wrote a short story about a white wolf—"Sky Wolf, A Fairy Tale." And then I wrote a wolf novel. I’m in love with wild wolf spirit.
In this stunning werewolf story, Reuben Golding struggles with “the gift” of transformation.
What happens to the soul of a human when the body transforms into a hungry, beastly werewolf? I enjoyed the mystical aspects of this fiction because Reuben awakens. The opening Christmas theme is a perfect background. I very much like that Reuben’s consciousness remained human. A very different take on the usual cursed werewolf.
Reuben is truly gifted. I admired how Anne Rice brings a beauty and a morality to the werewolf. Wolf spirit triumphs made this story five stars for me.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The tale of The Wolf Gift continues ... It is winter at Nideck Point and for Reuben Golding, now infused with the Wolf Gift, this promises to be a season like no other.
Oak fires burn in the stately flickering hearths, and the community organizes its annual celebration of music and pageantry. Reuben is preparing to honor an ancient Midwinter festival with his fellow Morphenkinder—a secret gathering that takes place deep within the verdant recesses of the surrounding forests.
However, Reuben is soon distracted by a ghost. Tormented, imploring, and unable to speak, it haunts the halls…
