Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition is engrossed in match-making schemes in which she is indeed vexed and emotionally entangled with the very far-seeing Mr. Knightley. Mr. Knightley is in fact, one of the few people who sees faults in Emma and who comes to love her for them.

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,...