The inhabitants of the Rochester house wield a strange power over their neighbors.

Gwendalynn Anders, a mid western girl who's never seen the ocean, wonders what was in that joint she smoked a week before waking up on Elysiana and why it feels like the trip will last the entire summer of 1969. Jack Halcyon, living atop an abandoned twenty-story hotel, wonders how he's able to ponder the incongruities of life after leaving a big chunk of his brain at the scene of an accident. Borough Council President Norman Harlan wonders what cruel...

"Delightful … a rich cast of characters … Parini does a superb job." - San Francisco Chronicle "[Parini] expertly navigates this multilayered narrative." - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Pleasure-filled … Parini writes lovingly and evocatively." - Los Angeles Times "Richly compelling … Parini renders the mentor-apprentice dynamic with great sensitivity." - Bookreporter.com

When Rion Kwirk and his unconventional family head to his grandfather's funeral, he tries to uncover the truth about Papa Kwirk's complicated relationship with Rion's father.

Beautiful, determined Tasmin Berrybender, daughter of a wealthy, aristocratic Englishman who has brought his family to America in 1830 on an adventure of exploration in the just-opening West, meets and falls in love with frontiersman Jim Snow, an Indian-fighter and part-time preacher known as "the Sin Killer."

Jake, a budding juvenile delinquent, is sent for home schooling to the arty and eccentric Applewhite family's Creative Academy, where he discovers talents and interests he never knew he had.

The Berrybenders, a family of English sportsmen, have traveled to America to hunt buffalo and other big game. As winter strikes, they settle in a trading post near the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. The aristocratic and outspoken eldest daughter Tasmin has married taciturn trapper Jim Snow, and is pregnant with their first child. But if this union seems strange, it is rivaled by the antics of the licentious Lord Berrybender.

Beck, Kate, and Wyatt thought they had finished hatching dragons from stones but when they are proved wrong, Beck must decide if acting on the inherited Pillage family traits will gain him what he really wants.

When sixth-grader Mac discovers several words of his classroom copy of Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic are blacked out he is outraged, so he, his friends, and his eccentric family set out to do something about the censorship imposed by one teacher andthe school board.

Upon his mother's death, fifteen-year-old Beck Phillips is sent to live with an eccentric uncle he had never met in a remote manor house, where he learns that his family suffers from a curse that allows him to make plants grow on command and dragon eggs hatch.