New books by Valley authors: Rachel Mazure releases kids series, novel for Rachel Howard
.jpg "Rachel Mazur of El Portal is the author of a new series of nature-based books aimed at kids in middle school.")
The Nature Club (series)
Author: Rachel Mazur, El Portal
Description: The Nature Club middle-grade books invite you to explore the outdoors with Izzy, Tai, Brooke, Zack and Miguel. Through their adventures, they learn to help the wildlife they love while helping each other with the challenges of growing up such as moving, parents’ divorce and getting glasses. The animals (birds, butterflies, bears, frogs and bobcats) face challenges as they migrate, go through metamorphosis and seek food. Each book ends with the kids finding a way to take simple actions to make a positive change in themselves and to help wildlife.
Mazur is the author of the picture book, “If You Were A Bear” (SNHA) and the narrative oral history, “Speaking of Bears” (FalconGuide). She holds a doctorate in wildlife ecology, is the author of several scientific and popular articles about wildlife, and currently works as the branch chief of wildlife at Yosemite National Park. (Wild Bear Press)
Available on Amazon, $6.99 each for paperback, free on Kindle Unlimited, www.natureclubbooks.com.
The Risk of Us
Author: Rachel Howard, who grew up in Fresno and graduated from Clovis High School
Description: Seven-year-old Maresa has inch-deep dimples and a voice that can beam to the moon. When the forty-something narrator in “The Risk of Us” first sees Maresa in a foster services agency in Northern California, she’s convinced Maresa is her future daughter. But does Maresa feel the same? And can her new family provide the care Maresa needs? As the couple navigates the bureaucratic foster care system, buried trauma and chronic health concerns threaten to crack open their marriage. With her husband, the narrator has a year – during which Maresa approaches the age at which children become nearly impossible to place – to decide to finalize the adoption, or whether what’s best for all of them is the unthinkable option: giving her up.
Drawing closely on her own experience as a foster parent, Howard writes in the tradition of Jenny Offill and Rachel Cusk about the inevitable tests children bring to a marriage, the uncertainties of family life, and the ways empathy can obliterate our defenses. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 208 pages)
Howard will give a reading at 11 a.m. on April 27 at Petunia’s Place in Fresno.
Available on Amazon, $12.99 for Kindle, $15.31 for hardcover, rachelhoward.com.