The Shark's Tooth (Young Palmetto Books)

A colorful story about our relationships with nature and imagination from a New York Times best-selling author

The Shark's Tooth is a poetic tale of imagination and conservation in which a young girl visiting her grandparents' beach house finds friendship with the ocean's creatures. Sharks' teeth are given to her by her new aquatic friends as gifts, symbolic of her connections to nature and the sea. As the little girl grows up and moves away to the city, she loses her kinship to the natural world. When she returns to the beach house as an adult, she is convinced that her childhood memories were only acts of make-believe―until she receives a sign that her ocean adventures may have been real after all.

The Shark's Tooth is the first children's book written by New York Times best-selling author Ron Rash. Cecile L. K. Martin's colorful cut-paper illustrations complement the story, and novelist and children's author Mary Alice Monroe provides an engaging afterword on the story's empowering message of creativity and conservation.

Ron Rash is the author of six novels, five collections of short stories, and four collections of poetry. He is also a two-time finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and winner of the O Henry Prize, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, the James Still Award of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and other honors. He teaches at Western Carolina University.

Cecile L. K. Martin teaches at the University of Georgia School of Environmental Design. She is a signature member of the National Watercolor Society, and a member with excellence and three-time winner of Best in Show in the South Carolina Watercolor Society. Martin's work is included in the South Carolina State Collection and in numerous corporate, public, and private collections.

Author and conservationist Mary Alice Monroe is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of thirteen novels and two children's books: Turtle Summer: A Journal for My Daughter and A Butterfly Called Hope.