Summer isn't looking good for Alana Alcott, an urban teacher of gifted students. She's been court ordered to teach summer school with Outward Bound instructor Mike Reynolds. Their students? Five unruly foster kids whose stories of abandonment mirror Alana's own childhood more than she wants to admit.
Mike, in particular, initially chafes on Alana's nerves. She sees him as an overgrown Boy Scout, promoting a nature-to-nurture philosophy that may or may not help their troubled students. And troubled they certainly are, with problems ranging from behavioral issues to a looming gang recruitment.
As Mike and Alana struggle to help their young charges connect with nature in the bleak concrete landscape of the projects, the two teachers find themselves increasingly attracted to each other. The demands of their students, however, interrupt their blossoming romance at every turn. Alana, meanwhile, finds herself forced to confront her own past-and the mother who abandoned her.
Over the course of one short summer, seven lives will change, for good or ill. If Mike and Alana can help it, their students will find hope and direction. Doing so, however, may mean putting their own happiness on hold-or sacrificing it forever.
About the Author: Cleo A. Lampos drew on personal experience when writing Cultivating Wildflowers. She spent a year in foster care and twenty-six years teaching fourth graders and "behavior disordered" classrooms in urban settings.
Lampos received her bachelor's degree in elementary education from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and her master's degree in special education from St. Xavier University in Chicago. She is listed in Who's Who in American Education.
Cultivating Flowers is the third book in Lampos's Teachers of Diamond Projects School series. She has published articles on parenting and educational issues for seventeen years and is the author of the nonfiction books Grandpa's Remembering Book and Teaching Diamonds in the Tough.
A volunteer for the Children's Hunger Fund and Share the Harvest, Lampos lives with her husband in the south suburbs of Chicago on an urban farm. They have three children and eleven grandchildren.
