Description

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When four friends are horrified to find their swimming hole filled with green slime, a mysterious naturalist named Riparia helps the children understand why the water became polluted—and together they figure out how they can bring clean water back to the river they all love.

At the back of the book is a list of the animals that appear in the story and an invitation to find them all. This lively story about non-point source pollution is filled with both information and action. Realistic, lush illustrations by Olga Pastuchiv illuminate the children's passion for their river and the ecosystem it supports.

About the Author

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Michael J. Caduto is an author, ecologist, storyteller, and musician who presents programs and performances to children of all ages around the world. In addition to being the only environmentalist who has ever used CPR to save a chipmunk's life, he is well known as the creator and co-author of the international best-selling Keepers of the Earth series, Native American Gardening, and Pond and Brook: A Guide to Nature in Freshwater Environments.

Olga Pastuchiv is a children's book author, painter, and commercial illustrator. Whether working on a fishing boat in Greece or as a landscape gardener in New England, Olga is always painting. She paints things large and small, from murals and parade floats to illustrations for several poetry and botany collections and a cookbook. Her picture book Minas and the Fish (Houghton Mifflin, 1989) is about a fisherman's boy she met on Karpathos Island. Olga lives in Maine with two cats.

Praise For…

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This story
will resonate with everyone who splashed in a stream as a child.
— Paul T. Zeph, Former President, North American Association for Environmental Education

If a river
could talk, it would sound like Riparia.
— Paper Tigers

A
wonderful, empowering story for children who will inherit the rivers.
— The Midwest Book Review