The eccentric, forceful, big-hearted Grandma Dowdel--the star of Peck's Newbery Medal-winning "A Year Down Yonder"--is back in this new story set during Christmas of 1958. A new family has moved in next door to Mrs. Dowdel, and soon she will work her particular brand of charm on all of them. Illustrations. Relates the surprising gifts bestowed on twelve-year-old Bob Barnhart and his family, who have recently moved to a small Illinois town in 1958,...

In 1947, after the war, Willa Mae's father returns to the Illinois town where she has lived with her maternal grandparents for the last five of her eleven years, and Willa Mae finds herself struggling to understand old family tensions and secrets.

"It's 1924, and Maddie Pastore has it made. A nice house, a loving husband with a steady job - even if it is connected to Chicago's violent Torrio-Capone gang - and a baby on the way. But then Tommy is shot dead, and she learns her husband had a secret that turns her life upside down. Penniless and grieving, Maddie is only sure of two things: that she will survive for the sake of her baby, and that she'll never turn to the mob for help. So when she's...

In a small town near Chicago in 1953, twelve-year-old Tommy faces escalating problems at home, among his Catholic school friends, and with the threat of a communist living nearby, but taking over his hospitalized sister's paper route introduces him to neighbors who he comes to rely on for help.

When Mae's Aunt Willa and Aunt Jane, both pilots, are kidnapped by evil Metallic Falcon, Josie, Mae, and Akiko, the Infinity Trinity, pursue them from Chicago to Sweetwater, Texas, to Paris, France.

A boy in Illinois remembers the homefront years of World War II, especially his two heroes--his brother in the Air Force and his father, who fought in the previous war.

"Eve Mann arrives in Ideal, Georgia, in 1972 looking for answers about the mother who died giving her life. A mother named Mercy. A mother who for all of Eve's twenty-two years has been a mystery and a quest. Eve's search for her mother, and the father she never knew, is a mission to discover her identity, her name, her people, and her home. Eve's questions and longing launch a multigenerational story that sprawls back to the turn of the twentieth...

"Newly engaged, Clive and Henrietta now begin the difficult task of meeting each other's family. "Difficult" because Clive has neglected to tell Henrietta that he is in fact the heir to the Howard estate and fortune, and Henrietta has just discovered that her mother has been hiding secrets about her past as well. When Clive brings Henrietta to the family estate to meet his parents, they are less than enthused about his impoverished intended. Left...

"It's 1935, and ever since the big crash and her father's subsequent suicide, Henrietta Von Harmon has been left with the job of caring for her antagonistic mother and seven younger siblings. In desperation, Henrietta finally agrees to take a job as a taxi dancer at a local dance hall. Just as she's beginning to enjoy herself, however, the floor matron suddenly turns up dead. When the aloof Inspector Howard appears on the scene to investigate, he...