When the principal asks a fifth-grader to write a letter regarding the purchase of a new drinking fountain for their school, he finds that all sorts of chaos results.
Discusses the various kinds of things to keep in a writer's notebook--seed ideas, mind pictures, lists, memories, samples of other writers' work--and why.
In the bleak, forbidding house of her great-aunts, neglected twelve-year-old orphan Maggie hears ghostly voices and finds magic that awakens in her the capacity to love and be loved.
When he moves from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island, Kenny discovers that his new house is haunted by the spirit of a black slave boy who asks Kenny to return with him to the early nineteenth century and prevent his murder by slave traders.
When nine-year-old Angela and her friends begin investigating the letters she has received from her fairy godmother, it helps take Angela's mind off her strained relationship with her father.
While spending the month of August on the Massachusetts shore with her father, stepmother, and their new baby, almost thirteen-year-old Maggie finds beauty in and draws strength from a great blue heron, even as the family around her unravels.
An outcast eight-year-old boy, orphaned by the Civil War, is taken in by the owner of a traveling medicine show and, despite the doubts of others, years later he confirms the man's faith in him.
