The "Great Recession" of 2008 has struck the United States. Calista Snipe's family is adversely affected by the recession. Her father loses his job as a college professor and although Calista's mother continues to work part time, the family's income has been greatly reduced. Now her father is faced with the probability that his unemployment checks will cease if Congress does not vote to extend them. When a very rare monkey, a gibbon, escapes from the local zoo, Calista decides she will catch the gibbon and give the reward money to her father. In her search for the escaped gibbon, Calista enlists the help of her best friend, Skyler McCray. Skyler and Calista joined forces when they were in fourth grade to solve the mystery of the lost purse. Now, two years older, they believe they are up to the task of finding and capturing Papillon, the missing gibbon. However, the challenge of catching the little monkey soon becomes more difficult than they had anticipated as Papillon continually travels from one city park to another, and Cali and Sky discover that they do not have the best of equipment to capture a gibbon. To complicate their task, they soon discover that other parties are interested in capturing the monkey, and these parties are not happy to find that Cali and Sky are in the competition to win the reward money. To Catch A Monkey explores the impact of the 2008 recession on a middle class family, peer bullying, beginning awareness of puberty for later elementary grade children, and the strengthening friendship between a sixth grade boy and girl.

In order to avoid a spring thunder storm, eight-year-old Calista Snipe and Skyler McCray take a short-cut through the unkept area of a local park. They are caught by the storm while in the middle of Creepy Hollow, but they make two unusual discoveries. These two discoveries soon lead the children on new adventures that will test their creativity, their imagination, and their courage. Find out how Calista and Skyler solve the mystery of the old purse, snare the person who has been trapping little animals in Creepy Hollow, discover the truth behind the man in the park, and help their friend, Tabitha, reveal what happened to her on the day she was kidnapped.

Having been discovered in the illicit romance with her uncle, Megan Morgan is forced to face life without her uncle's counsel. Initially, Megan pushes back into her many school activities to fill the void but soon finds herself frustrated by a number of situations. Megan's recently discovered sister-in-arms, Kelly Simmons, now only has time for new love Ryan Royek. Megan's mother, Kate, has also become enamored with an attorney, Gus Leone, whom kate meets through her court-reporting endeavors. Joe Edwards, the boy with whom Megan attended her school's Mistletoe Ball, is sidelined from dating Megan with a sport related injury. Megan must also find a way to deal with Harry Campbell, the counselor that Kate has required Megan to see for ten sessions in order to acquire insight on Megan's affair with Uncle Jack. Matters come to a head the night of the school play. Megan becomes involved in many bizarre activities at a clandestine post play party at the home of the son of a wealthy plastic surgeon. New alliances formed at the party will later prove crucial in Megan's life. She finds Paul Ugalini, the party host, and Nadine Cortez, a young photojournalist, both alluring and perplexing, and discovers why Paul's precocious younger sister refers to the family bathroom as the "great bath." On her return home, Megan is forced to accept assistance from a person she despises and consequently encounters two overwhelming traumatic events. Megan must draw on the help of family and friends plus her own resources to survive and overcome the aftermath of those events.

Kyle Cook is in tenth grade. His father died in a car accident when Kyle was eleven. He lives with his mother and his fourteen-year-old sister. He kicks field goals and extra points after touchdowns for his high school football team. He also harbors, in the deep recesses of his mind, a horrible secret of a past event. Kyle's secret has lain dormant, its effects on him hardly noticeable to his family and his friends until his awakening sexual interests cause the influences of Kyle's earlier trauma to arise and become noticeable in his behavior. Kyle's abnormal behavior threatens to rend asunder his family's cohesion. Kyle's mother wisely involves him in therapeutic counseling. Although his counselor may be physically limited as she is confined to a wheel chair, her intuition and skilled intervention with Kyle are unfettered. Kyle soon seems on the road to recovery until one more catastrophe, the cause rooted in Kyle's past, threatens to destroy all that he has been able to accomplish. The author hopes that 'Points After Abuse' will provide insight for young adults both to the effects that trauma may have on one's behavior and to the importance of being open when engaging in a counseling relationship in order to maximize the benefits of that relationship. There are other novels that deal with similar issues: like 'Speak', by Laurie Anderson, and 'Dreamland' by Sarah Dessen. Both books feature female protagonists. 'Points After Abuse' focuses on a male protagonist.

This volume of essays frames a comparative history of landscape painting in Australia and the United States through recent considerations of the Anthropocene, arguing that careful and deep analysis of specific nineteenth-century artworks reveals issues of environmental concern both past and present. Carefully drawn from two symposia held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth in 2016 and at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne the following year, the volume includes eight essays and a conversation between artists. Colonization, Wilderness, and Spaces Between brings together the fresh insights of scholars and artists from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States and provides a resource for thinking critically about the historical, imperial, and environmental information that can be gleaned from looking closely at landscape paintings.

William Molyneux's question to John Locke about whether a blind man restored to sight could name the difference between a cube and a sphere without touching them shaped fundamental conflicts in philosophy, theology and science between empirical and idealist answers that are radically alien to current ways of seeing and feeling but were born of colonizing ambitions whose devastating genocidal and ecocidal consequences intensify today. This Element demonstrates how landscape paintings of unfamiliar terrains required historical and geological subject matter to supply tactile associations for empirical recognition of space, whereas idealism conferred unmediated but no less coercive sensory access. Close visual and verbal analysis using photographs of pictorial sites trace vividly different responses to the question, from those of William Hazlitt and John Ruskin in Britain to those of nineteenth-century authors and artists in the United States and Australia, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, William Haseltine, Fitz Henry Lane and Eugene von Guerard.