The Winter Visitors

This charming and highly original story reveals what happens at a vacation cottage once the summer visitors have left for the winter. With fewer than two dozen words, the story is told primarily in pictures. Children and adults will revel in the activities of a family of bears that takes up residence in the empty camp.

When the summer visitors leave in the fall, a new group of visitors moves into the vacation cottage to spend the winter.

After a snowfall a variety of animals take shelter in a house.

“A stunningly atmospheric fantasy that doubles as an exceptional character study . . . we can’t wait to see where Dabos takes it next.” —Entertainment Weekly (“The 10 Best YA Books of 2018”) One of Publishers Weekly’s Best YA Books of the Year A National Indie Bestseller Lose yourself in the fantastic world of the arks and in the company of unforgettable characters in this French runaway hit, Christelle Dabos’ The Mirror Visitor quartet. Plain-spoken, headstrong Ophelia cares little about appearances. Her ability to read the past of objects is unmatched in all of Anima and, what’s more, she possesses the ability to travel through mirrors, a skill passed down to her from previous generations. Her idyllic life is disrupted, however, when she is promised in marriage to Thorn, a taciturn and influential member of a distant clan. Ophelia must leave all she knows behind and follow her fiancé to Citaceleste, the capital of a cold, icy ark known as the Pole, where danger lurks around every corner and nobody can be trusted. There, in the presence of her inscrutable future husband, Ophelia slowly realizes that she is a pawn in a political game that will have far-reaching ramifications not only for her but for her entire world. The World of the Arks Long ago, following a cataclysm called the Rupture, the world was shattered into many floating celestial islands, now known as arks. Over each, the spirit of an omnipotent and immortal ancestor abides. The inhabitants of these arks each possess a unique power. Ophelia, with her ability to read the pasts of objects, must navigate this fantastic, disjointed, perilous world using her trademark tenacity and quiet strength.

This follow-up to the successful The Winter Visitors, traces the interactions between a family of bears and a human family during their summer stay at a lake cottage. Told primarily through illustration, with only a few dozen words in the book, children and parents (and grandparents) alike will delight in following the antics of the bumbling bears as they enjoy the comforts of cottage life, but also try to avoid detection by their human hosts.

In this fourth and final book in Karel Hayes's acclaimed Visitors series, the beloved family of bears gets in another round of adventures as they experience the full enjoyment of a New England autumn. First up the country fair--the bears sneak onto the midway after hours to play the games and be thrilled by the rides. Next comes Halloween, for which the bears all cleverly disguise themselves to gather a load of trick-or-treat candy. And finally there's a big Thanksgiving feast for all the friends of the forest. As always, the bears manage to have all their fun while carefully avoiding detection.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to capture the essence of an individual place. The impressions of travelers in particular have a special allure—unanticipated and serendipitous, their views get to the heart of a particular region because nothing to them is routine or expected. First published in 1933 by the University of Chicago Press to mark the occasion of the Century of Progress Exhibition, As Others See Chicago consists of writings culled from over a thousand men and women who visited the city and commented on the best and worst it had to offer, from the skyscrapers to the stockyards. Originally compiled by Bessie Louise Pierce, the first major historian of Chicago, and featuring her own incisive commentary, the volume brings together the impressions of visitors to Chicago over two and a half centuries, from the early years of Westward Expansion to the height of the Great Depression. In addition to writings from better known personalities such as Rudyard Kipling and Waldo Frank, the book collects the opinions of missionaries, aristocrats, journalists, and politicians—observers who were perfectly placed to comment on the development of the city, its inhabitants, and well known events that would one day define Chicago history, such as the Great Fire of 1871 and the 1893 World's Fair. Taking us back to a time when Chicago was "more astonishing than the wildest visions of the most vagrant imaginations," As Others See Chicago offers an enthralling portrait of an enduring American metropolis.