On a hot summer day in 1932, Andy Connors, who owns a garage that serves Route 66, finds himself in major trouble: He's been bitten by a rabid skunk.

Having been abandoned by his beautiful wife, Henry and their two young children, spend the summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. Henry, devastated by the desertion, struggles to provide for them. When Mrs. Phyllis Farley, a prosperous neighbour, begins to woo the children as companions for her strange, housebound son, Henry must weigh an unusual proposition, the consequences of which may cost him everything.

Born with no air in his lungs, it was only when Reuben Land's father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that Reuben's lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy who knows firsthand that life is a gift, and also one who suspects that his father is touched by God and can overturn the laws of nature.

The quiet 1960's midwestern life of the Lands is upended when Reuben's brother Davy

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Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce is an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. In the summer of 1950, a series of inexplicable events strikes Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that her family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp pinned to its beak. Later, Flavia finds a man dying in the cucumber patch. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. (Bestseller)...

Growing up on a farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow knows how to do a lot, but when her mom dies after a long illness, Bertie finds herself in charge of four younger siblings and struggling to keep the family together.