Everything you need to understand or teach The Beasties by William Sleator.
Environmentalism has been a motif in Sleator's earlier novels (for instance The Night the Heads Came; 1996 see separate entry, Vol 9), but in The Beasties, it becomes important for the motivations of the characters. In The Beasties, a botanist takes his family to spend the summer in a large house in a forest, where he can study fungus. The forest is being chopped down by lumber companies, leaving hillsides denuded of trees and most...