Description

Everglades Forever takes you on an exciting trip through the Everglades, an area unique in the world, an eco-system that is really "a wide, slow-moving river," filled with plants and animal life found nowhere else on Earth. Your fellow travelers are students from a school perched on the eastern edge of this environment. With their teacher, the amazing Ms. Stone, fifth-graders Robert, Tiler, Vedantee and Conrado explore the backwaters of the Everglades, the Miccosukee nation ( a self-governing nation within the Everglades), and have some face-to-face contact with alligators and other Everglades’ creatures.

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What made you want to write a book on the Everglades?

We all need stories in our lives, and when I write a book, I want to tell a good story. There is no better story than the Everglades. The book begins with a quote from Jackie Stone, the fifth grade teacher at Avocado Elementary School — “In the whole world, there is only one Everglades.” The Everglades is teeming with life —alligators, panthers, thousands of amazing birds, wonderfully exotic fish, snakes, and insects, tiny snails, sharks, manatees, trees, flowers, and ferns. The list could go on forever. Unfortunately, the Everglades will not go on forever, unless kids today know about it and want to protect it. The readers of this book, as they grow older, will be the stewards of the Everglades, and they need to know its story. Then they can be part of the solution for protecting the only Everglades the world will ever have.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

I hope this story about the Everglades will give children the power to be part of the solution for helping to save the Everglades. We also want children to know they can find wonderful wild places everywhere — even in the ponds and streams close to them, and see the mystery that lies in them. As a child growing up in Minnesota, I loved looking at the tiny, tiny life that abounds in any drop of wild water. They can find this, too. It’s a start to saving our world.

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Reviews

“Marx offers a wonderful introduction to the natural history and environment of the Everglades by documenting the studies of a fifth-grade class in Homestead, Florida…readers will feel as though they are part of the class…many will come away wishing that they had a teacher as cool as Mrs. Stone.”
-Booklist

"Trish Marx has woven the beauty, importance, and silence of the Everglades into a single book for young readers – a seemingly impossible task. If we truly want this unique ecosystem to be restored to its former grandeur, Everglades Forever should be required reading throughout the U.S., for children and their parents."
- W. Hodding Carter, author of Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from its Friends, Foes and Florida

"A wonderful book on environmental studies. The author emphasizes that fact that the restoration will take 30 years, which means the children will someday share responsibility of the future of the Everglades…"
- Board of Cooperative Educational Services

“Marx has woven the beauty, important, and silence of the Everglades into a single book for young readers – a seemingly impossible task…”W. Hodding Carter, author of Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from its Friends, Foes, and Florida"
- Lasting Connections Title, Book Links 2005

“…the children, and the animals and plants of the Everglades are vibrantly depicted, and are paired with a text that includes some difficult concept and language but is also full of adventure and interest.”
- School Library Journal