The summer before seventh grade, Venola Mae Cutright, Belington, West Virginia's best newspaper carrier, writes a series of humorous letters to her best friend away at camp, the Ultra Underwater Flea Circus Company, and her newspaper boss.
Needing to earn money after his father's death during the influenza epidemic of 1918, thirteen-year-old Joshua works as a newspaper boy in Boston, one day finding himself in the vicinity of an explosion that sends tons of molasses coursing through the streets.