Lari Don

Twelve myths and legends celebrate the courage of heroines from around the world as they confront and defeat dragons, monsters, wolves, demons, and even the sun.

A princess makes a daring deal with the Queen of the Snakes. A lonely sister weaves stinging plants together in order to save her brothers from their mother. A curious boy suddenly becomes a wolf cub. Discover a worldwide collection of shape-shifter stories, based on folktales and lore from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. From cursed princes to the first werewolves, things aren't always what they seem!

A little girl meets a wolf in the forest on her way to visit her grandmother.

Helen has won a place at a prestigious summer music school in remote north-western Scotland. But as she practises for a concert on Midsummer's Eve, her friends, the fabled beasts, prepare for battle -- in the very forest where the young musicians are staying. When Yann the centaur arrives and warns Helen of impending danger, she is forced to cast her musical ambitions aside. Helen finds herself catapulted into a perilous quest, allied with fantastical...

Held captive in the woods by a bear, a young Russian girl cleverly finds a way to return safely home to her family.

One sunny morning the triplets disappear, leaving only a few mysterious clues behind: an open upstairs window, three missing rocking horses and some strangely shaped marks on the lawn outside. Could they be hoofprints? Used to their silly pranks, older sister Pearl sets out to find them. At the garden gate she encounters Thomas, the snooty grandson of a local earl, who warns her that the moors aren't safe today. But who is he to boss Pearl around?...

When Yann the centaur is stabbed through the heart by a unicorn horn, the life-threatening injury needs a magical remedy. Helen and her fabled-beast friends unite, with the help of the dragons, to find a magical token with the power to heal him. But they only have until tomorrow night. The friends split into teams: Lee, Helen and Sapphire search for King Arthur's scabbard; Catesby, Lavender and Sylvie search for hidden gems in a cliff face; Rona and...

Molly's shape-shifting curse is getting stronger and more unpredictable. Becoming a hare she could cope with. At least she could run... fast. But now she's turning into the prey of any predator she hears. Life's pretty dangerous if you become a worm whenever you hear a bird tweet. As Molly and her friends search for a stone that can curb the Promise Keeper's powers, and each one of them must face their own monster, Molly is forced to choose: is she...

Molly's curse is getting worse. The curse-breaking workshop hasn't exactly turned out how Molly and her friends had hoped. And now something is going wrong with the way curses work. The team need to find the Promise Keeper who controls all curses, but

When a draught leaves all the animals hungry, one by one they try to discover the name of the magical tree that will give them its fruit if asked by name-but only one animal will succeed. This illustrated chapter book retelling of folktale from Zambia is available individually and as part of the Stories from around the World: 4 Tales of Persistence & Grit set. Lari Don was born in Chile and brought up in Scotland. She has worked in politics and...