Recommended reading on nature related topics from librarians at the Toledo Lucas County Public  Library.

The Dark
by Lemony Snicket

Laszlo is afraid of the dark. 

The dark lives in the same house as Laszlo. Mostly, though, the dark stays in the basement and doesn't come into Lazslo's room. But one night, it does. 

This is the story of how Laszlo stops being afraid of the dark. 

With emotional insight and poetic economy, two award-winning talents team up to conquer a universal childhood fear. 

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The Wolf, The Duck, and the Mouse
by Mac Barnett 

This is a story about a duck and mouse who get swallowed by a wolf, and then decide to live in his belly.

Early one morning a mouse met a wolf
and was quickly gobbled up.

When a woeful mouse is swallowed by a wolf, he quickly learns he is not alone: a duck has already set up digs, and, boy, has that duck got it figured out! Turns out it’s pretty nice in there, with delicious food and elegant table settings, courtesy of the wolf’s unchecked gluttony. And there’s something even better: no more fear of being eaten by a wolf! In fact, life is pretty good, until a hunter shows up. . . . With a nod to traditional fables and a wink to the reader, the award-winning Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen offer a tale of cooperation and creative cuisine that is sure to go down easy. 

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Small Spaces
by Katherine Arden 

After suffering a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Ollie who only finds solace in books discovers a chilling ghost story about a girl named Beth, the two brothers who loved her, and a peculiar deal made with "the smiling man"--a sinister specter who grants your most tightly held wish, but only for the ultimate price. 

Captivated by the tale, Ollie begins to wonder if the smiling man might be real when she stumbles upon the graves of the very people she's been reading about on a school trip to a nearby farm. Then, later, when her school bus breaks down on the ride home, the strange bus driver tells Ollie and her classmates: "Best get moving. At nightfall they'll come for the rest of you." Nightfall is, indeed, fast descending when Ollie's previously broken digital wristwatch begins a startling countdown and delivers a terrifying message: RUN. 

Only Ollie and two of her classmates heed these warnings. As the trio head out into the woods--bordered by a field of scarecrows that seem to be watching them--the bus driver has just one final piece of advice for Ollie and her friends: "Avoid large places. Keep to small." 

And with that, a deliciously creepy and hair-raising adventure begins. 

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Girl in the Dark
by Anna Lyndsey

Anna Lyndsey was young and ambitious and worked hard; she had just bought an apartment; she was falling in love. Then what started as a mild intolerance to certain kinds of artificial light developed into a severe sensitivity to all light. 

Now, at the worst times, Anna is forced to spend months on end in a blacked-out room, where she loses herself in audiobooks and elaborate word games in an attempt to ward off despair. During periods of relative remission, she can venture out cautiously at dawn and dusk into a world that, from the perspective of her cloistered existence, is filled with remarkable beauty. And through it all there is Pete, her love and her rock, without whom her loneliness seems boundless. 

One day Anna had an ordinary life, and then the unthinkable happened. But even impossible lives, she learns, endure. Girl in the Dark is a tale of an unimaginable fate that becomes a transcendent love story. It brings us to an extraordinary place from which we emerge to see the light and the world anew. 

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Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories
Edited, illustrated and introduced by Audrey Niffenegger 

Collected and introduced by the bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry—including her own fabulous new illustrations for each piece, and a new story by Niffenegger—this is a unique and haunting anthology of some of the best ghost stories of all time. 

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Some Kind of Animal
by Maria Romasco-Moore 

Jo lives in the same Appalachian town where her mother disappeared fifteen years ago. Everyone knows what happened to Jo's mom. She was wild, and bad things happen to girls like that.

Now people are starting to talk about Jo. She's barely passing her classes and falls asleep at her desk every day. She's following in her mom's footsteps.

Jo does have a secret. It's not what people think, though. Not a boy or a drug habit. Jo has a twin sister.

Jo's sister is not like most people. She lives in the woods--catches rabbits with her bare hands and eats them raw. Night after night, Jo slips out of her bedroom window and meets her sister in the trees. And together they run, fearlessly.

The thing is, no one's ever seen Jo's sister. So when her twin attacks a boy from town, everyone assumes that it was Jo. Which means Jo has to decide--does she tell the world about her sister, or does she run? 

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