The Big Bad Snake

A group of children telling a fantasy story, this book is part of the Hop, Step, Jump series that moves on from stories told in simple sentences with basic grammatical structures, through freer use of language to the level of reading reached at primary school.

A big, bad snake is on TV in The Big, Bad Snake. An exciting new set of Level 1+ stories from Roderick Hunt and Alex Brychta. Full of humour and drama with familiar settings and real-life scenarios that children can relate to that will delight young readers. Featuring all your favourite characters, children will enjoy exploring the detailed humorous illustrations and be captivated by the storylines. These phonics-based stories are perfect for embedding and building on children's phonics knowledge. They contain high-interest vocabulary to support language development. Each book contains inside cover notes to help adults read and explore the content with the child, supporting their decoding and language comprehension development. Free teaching notes on Oxford Owl support independent reading, guided reading, writing, and speaking, listening and drama activities.

A young girl learns facts about snakes, including their behavior, physical characteristics, and eating habits, to overcome her trepidation.

Kali's father is a snake catcher - the best in the village. Kali knows that is really something to be proud of, but at school he sometimes gets embarrassed. The other children seem to think there is something very strange about having a snake catcher for a father and eating things like fried termites for a snack. Plus, Kali is the teacher's pet. How will he ever make friends?

Lieutenant Kramer and Sergeant Zondi have their hands full. On the same day that an adult entertainer known as Eve is found accidentally strangled to death in her dressing room, her pet python wrapped dead around her neck, a beloved candy shop owner named "Lucky" Siyayo is shot to death at his counter in a botched robbery. The detective duo quickly realize neither death is as simple as it looks on the surface: Lucky Siyayo's cash register was all but empty the day he was murdered, which suddenly throws a whole rash of fatal neighborhood robberies into perspective—were none of them robberies at all? It becomes clear a killer is on the loose, but Zondi and Kramer must figure out what the killer is after. Meanwhile, postmortem analysis reveals that Eve didn't die at the time her ex-boss had stated he'd discovered her body; the more Kramer picks the circumstances apart, the less they make sense. With two very different sets of crimes to solve, Kramer and Zondi set off on treks that take them all over town, from the poorer villages to the sleazy dressing rooms of con artists and pimps to gorgeous steop of the South African countryside in another surefire investigation full of both stirring observations of Apartheid and plenty of mischief. Only one thing is for sure—no one is getting to take his day off this week!

Stevie Marsh is off for the summer to learn about computers at Camp Viper. He’s not happy about being in the woods with all the bugs and poison ivy and—yuck!—snakes. But how bad can computer camp be? Then Stevie finds out Camp Viper isn’t a computer camp at all. The vipers at this camp are the kind that slither!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Suicide Squad in this adult dark, rompy novel in which the most beloved villains from Buffy must team up to stop the Slayer from ending their evil universe! Demondale, Callifornia, 1999...Like Sunnydale, but whole lot more evil. Step into this alternate reality, where chaos reigns supreme. The Mayor's sun-shade has created permanent darkness over Sunnydale, fully opening the Hellmouth once and for all. Now the newly christened Demondale has become a safe haven for vampires, beasts, and all types of ruffians. It's never been better to be bad. Aspiring supervillains (and super nerds) Jonathan and Andrew attempt to hold their own in a town full of monsters, while eleven-hundred-year-old vengeance demon Anya is just looking for something to give her life purpose again, spending her days working at an evil juice bar. But soon word gets out that there's a new Big Bad on the scene, one more powerful and more destructive than anyone who has come before. She, of course, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And she's hell-bent on rooting out all of this reality's evil by any means necessary. Now Jonathan, Andrew, and Anya must recruit a team of Demondale's most notorious villains—including Angelus, Spike, Drusilla, and even Ripper the malevolent magic shop owner—in order to save their world. But it'll be no easy feat to put their pride and differences aside and stop the worst thing that has ever come to town: good. Written by acclaimed author and Buffy super fan Lily Anderson, this novel brings together Buffy's most devious and beloved villains from the Trio to the Whirlwind to Anya, Glory, and Vampire Willow. This is one apocalypse Buffy fans are not going to want to miss!