After his mother's death, eleven-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there thirty years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life. Eventually she was inspired to take up painting so she could capture its utter desolation.The...

A simplified version of the tale of orphaned, eleven-year-old Pollyanna, who comes to live with austere and wealthy Aunt Polly, bringing happiness to her aunt and other members of the community through her philosophy of gladness.

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women had been blamed for everything that went wrong in their Massachusetts town. And Gillian and Sally endured that fate as well; as children, the sisters were outsiders. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, but all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they shared brought them back, almost as if by...

Judy's big plans for the summer seem ruined when two of her best friends go away, and then her parents leave her and Stink with Aunt Opal, but a new "thrill-a-delic" plan has her racing toward fun.

Nine-year-old cousins Lily, Rosie, and Tess are sad when it is time to leave Aunt Lucy, so they plan a party and get a special surprise to look forward to in the near future.

When Cora and her younger sister, Mimi, are sent to stay with their great Auntie Ida in an isolated village in 1958, they discover that they are in danger from a centuries-old evil and, along with village boys Roger and Peter, strive to uncover the horrifying truth before it is too late.

Smarting from her recently canceled wedding and about to turn forty, Laurie Sassalyn returns to her Maine hometown of Calcasset to handle the estate of her great-aunt Dot, a spirited adventurer who lived to be ninety-three. Alongside boxes of Polaroids and pottery, a mysterious wooden duck shows up at the bottom of a cedar chest. Laurie’s curiosity is piqued, especially after she finds a love letter to the never-married Dot that ends with the line...

"The story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her...

When twelve-year-old Ruby's mother goes to jail, Ruby finds her Aunt Eleanor, an ornery nun with some dark secrets, who Ruby hopes will help free her mother.

"Bud Threadgoode grew up in the bustling little railroad town of Whistle Stop, Alabama, with his mother Ruth, church going and proper, and the fun-loving hell-raiser, his Aunt Idgie. Together they ran the town's popular Whistle Stop Caf�e, known far and wide for its famous 'Fried Green Tomatoes.' And as Bud often said of his childhood, 'How lucky can you get?' But sadly, the railroad yards began to shut down and the town became a ghost town, with...