Four brief "stories" about parents, trains, and cows, or is it really all one story? The author recommends careful inspection of words and pictures to both minimize and enhance confusion.

"Mary Poppins teachers her irrepressible young charges the basics of the kitchen"--Front jacket flap.

Meg investigates the theft of a rare book from a locked library. The reader is challenged to solve the mystery before Meg, using clues in both text and illustrations.

On a stormy night two hundred years ago, a young woman sat in a dark house and dreamed of her life as a writer. She longed to follow the path her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had started down, but young Mary Shelley had yet to be inspired. As the night wore on, Mary grew more anxious. The next day was the deadline that her friend, the poet Lord Byron, had set for writing the best ghost story. After much talk of science and the secrets of life,...

On a whale watch, Meg tries to solve a puzzling case involving a stolen treasure map. The reader is asked to solve the mystery before Meg, using clues found in the text and illustrations.

"A celebration of the extraordinary life of Ezra Jack Keats, creator of The Snowy Day. The story of The Snowy Day begins more than one hundred years ago, when Ezra Jack Keats was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. The family were struggling Polish immigrants, and despite Keats's obvious talent, his father worried that Ezra's dream of being an artist was an unrealistic one. But Ezra was determined. By high school he was winning prizes and scholarships. Later,...

The King, tired of rain, snow, sun, and fog, commands his magicians to make something else come down from the sky, but when oobleck falls, in sticky greenish droplets, Bartholomew Cubbins shames the King and saves the kingdom.

An elephant's eleventh birthday party is marked by eleven games preceding the banquet to be eaten at the eleventh hour; but when the time to eat arrives, the birthday feast has disappeared. The reader is invited to guess the thief. The solution is provided in a sealed end section.

"A captivating picture book biography of a boy who imagined a world full of dragons and grew up to be beloved author J. R. R. Tolkien. John Ronald loved dragons. He liked to imagine dragons when he was alone, and with his friends, and especially when life got hard or sad. After his mother died and he had to live with a cold-hearted aunt, he looked for dragons. He searched for them at his boarding school. And when he fought in a Great War, he felt...