A collection of three stories about a child who reads the lips of those who whisper secrets into a statue's ear; a daydreaming shoemaker's apprentice who must find ways to make the girl he loves notice him; and a stone carver who creates a statue of a ghost.
Seventeen-year-old Del, tired of being bounced between foster homes, is thwarted in her decision to run away by an all-day Los Angeles traffic jam, which serves as the basis of the one-woman show she writes and performs eight years later.
Northerners, Southerners, generals, couriers, dreaming boys, and worried sisters describe the glory, the horror, the thrill, and the disillusionment of the first battle of the Civil War.
While visiting the county fair, a brother and sister are enthralled by a shadow puppet show presentation of "Beauty and the Beast" in which all the shadows are made by one man.
In this horror novel parody, three self-centered members of Cliffside High School's ruling clique, who are beginning to age rapidly, become convinced that the beautiful new exchange student is the ghost of the girl whose death they caused the year before.
