Franny Hansen is a 10-year-old piano prodigy living in Rusty Nail, Minnesota. Once the Coot Capitol of the world, in 1953 it's just a run-of-the-mill town with one traffic light and a bizarre cast of characters. She's long exhausted the talents of the town's only piano teacher and seems destined to perform at church events and school assemblies, until a mysterious Russian woman arrives in Rusty Nail. Franny's neighbors are convinced the "Commie" is a threat to their American way of life, but Franny's not so sure. Could this stranger be her ticket out of Rusty Nail?Lesley M. M. Blume returns with the poignant and laugh-out-loud funny story of one girl's attempt to pursue the American dream in small town America.From the Hardcover edition.

The heartwarming story of a young girl sent to live with the extraordinary Murphy Family in southern France.Ten-year-old Alice Atherton is sent by her father to spend the summer with his dear friends the Murphys who live with their three children and pet monkey in the French Riveria. There, Alice will meet and learn from some of the most extraordinary luminaries of the time. She visits a junk yard with Pablo Picasso looking for objects to make into art, performs a dance inspired by celestial bodies with the renowned Ballet Russes, and imagines magical adventures with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.An uplifting story that will appeal to readers who love books by authors like Kate DiCamillo and Jeanne Birdsall.

Perhaps you think fairies are figments of the imagination, or even relics of an ancient past. You may even think all fairies are lovely winged creatures, who dance in bluebell fields, granting wishes to anyone who should encounter them. You would be wrong on all counts. Fairies are very much alive today, and they are everywhere--in our cities, our backyards, and even our kitchen cupboards. Some of them are indeed the sweet-tempered, winged creatures of folklore, but the fairy family also includes goblins, trolls, brownies, and other strange creatures, some of which are revealed to humans in this book for the very first time. While many fairy breeds are harmless, others can be quite nasty or even dangerous.In this luxuriously illustrated guidebook, preeminent fairy expert Miss Edythe McFate shares her knowledge of the modern fairy world and includes practical advice on matters such as how to tell a good fairy from a bad one, how to spot a "fairy ring," how to...

Eleven-year-old Cornelia is the daughter of two world-famous pianists--a legacy that should feel fabulous, but instead feels just plain lonely. She surrounds herself with dictionaries and other books to isolate herself from the outside world. But when a glamorous neighbor named Virginia Somerset moves next door with her servant Patel and a mischievous French bulldog named Mister Kinyatta, Cornelia discovers that the world is a much more exciting place than she had originally thought.An unforgettable story of friendship and adventure that takes readers around the world and back again, Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters is a dazzling first novel by Lesley M. M. Blume.From the Hardcover edition.

When her grandmother dies and the once-majestic family estate is sold, eleven-year-old Julia Lancaster and her aunt Constance must take to the road to find Julia's long-lost mother. They bring with them only the most practical travel things--silver candlestick holders, a few Oriental carpets, some steamer trunks, and Julia's beloved Brownie camera, which she will use to document their journey across 1960s America. On the road, Julia and her aunt meet a cast of peculiar characters, including guitar-strumming hippies in Greenwich Village, a legendary voodoo queen in New Orleans, the honorable proprietor of the World's End Cattle Ranch in Texas, and the colorful sheriff of Gold Point, Nevada (population: 1), who also happens to be the town's mayor, fire chief, and reverend. But will they find Julia's mother and a place to call home? Poignant, engaging, and funny, Lesley M. M. Blume's new novel is a meditation on the thin line between being an insider and being an...

The making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his groundbreaking novel The Sun Also Rises. This revolutionary work redefined modern literature as much as it did his peers, who would forever after be called the Lost Generation. But the full story of Hemingway's legendary rise has remained untold until now. Lesley Blume resurrects the explosive, restless landscape of 1920s Paris and Spain and reveals how Hemingway helped create his own legend. He made himself into a death-courting, bull-fighting aficionado; a hard-drinking, short-fused literary genius;...

The journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins might just be the most extraordinary contribution to the study of the earth's past since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. In the incredible pages of these thought-to-be-lost diaries, Dr. Wiggins--whom we now must consider the greatest paleozoologist of all time--has divulged the secrets of the truly ancient animal world: a world before human beings; a world before dinosaurs; a world that, until now, existed well beyond the outer reaches of human imagination. From deadly Amazonian Whispering Vines (Vitus Sussurus) to curious creatures called Brittle Bones (Futilis Ossis) to a mysterious pet named Gibear (Chiroptera Vicugna Pacosis), the discoveries of Dr. Wiggins will forever change the way we think about the world before us.