School and teachers

Tahi

This is the true story of the remarkable team effort to save a kiwi that lost its leg. The fictional narrator of the story is a schoolboy who is doing a project on kiwi. This is very much a multi-layered story with the tale of the kiwi running alongside the story of the boy and his attempts to impress his teacher. As well as those stories, great factual detail about kiwi appears in the boy’s notebook on every spread. Weta Workshop, the Artificial Limb Centre and Wellington Zoo all joined forces to provide this kiwi with an artifical leg.

Hostage To War

When Tatjana was ten years old, Nazi Germany declared war on Russia. Enduring terrible conditions and near-starvation in workcamps, Tatjana survived through liberation, but had more obstacles to overcome before fulfilling her dream to become a teacher.

The Revenant

When Willie arrives in Indian Territory, she knows only one thing: no one can find out who she really is. To escape a home she doesn’t belong in anymore, she assumes the name of a former classmate and accepts a teaching job at the Cherokee Female Seminary. Nothing prepares her for what she finds there. Her pupils are the daughters of the Cherokee elite-educated and more wealthy than she, and the school is cloaked in mystery. A student drowned in the river last year, and the girls whisper that she was killed by a jealous lover. Willie’s room is the very room the dead girl slept in. The students say her spirit haunts it. Willie doesn’t believe in ghosts, but when strange things start happening at the school, she isn’t sure anymore. She’s also not sure what to make of a boy from the nearby boys’ school who has taken an interest in her-his past is cloaked in secrets. Soon, even she has to admit that the revenant may be trying to tell her something. . . .