When Great Aunt Tilda comes to visit, it takes her a little while to learn to understand Josh, who has autism, just as it takes him some time to get used to her.
Leaving his parents, his Mad Uncle Jack, and his Even Madder Aunt Maud at home at Awful End, Eddie Dickens, along with the color-blind Lady Constance, boards the ship the Pompous Pig on a mission to America.
Rachel leads a lonely life with the old people she calls the Fossils until she starts to receive the Warnings, strange psychic messages that let her know of a grave threat.
Vannie tries to make the best of things when she and her dog Muffy are left with her cranky great-aunt on an old farm in Ohio while Vannie's parents go to California to look for work.
Great-aunt Alice Rumphius resolved when young that she would someday travel to faraway places, live by the sea, and accomplish something to make the world more beautiful.
Juanita and Miguel's great aunt, T?a Lola, comes from the Dominican Republic to help take care of them after their parents divorce, and soon she is so involved in their small Vermont community that when her visa expires, the whole town turns out to support her.
During the summer of 1932 when Lily is twelve years old, she is granted her two greatest wishes, to be far from the sister who torments her and to have a horse of her own, but she does not expect either the tragic events that bring this about or their consequences.
After making her girlhood dreams of world travel and living by the sea come true, a retired librarian follows her grandfather's old advice of doing something to make the world more beautiful, and then passes that wisdom on to her grandniece.
