"Summoned back to the New Orleans home she fled nearly twenty years earlier to attend her father's funeral, Jillian is drawn into the lives of the eccentric residents of her grandmother's apartment house and the mystery of strange messages and relics that have been appearing on the steps."--

Sophie the spider makes wondrous webs, but the residents of Beekman's Boarding House do not appreciate her until at last, old and tired, she weaves her final masterpiece.

Samantha's husband has left her, and after a spree of overcharging at Tiffany's, she settles down to reconstruct a life for herself and her eleven-year-old son. Her eccentric mother tries to help by fixing her up with dates, but a more pressing problem is money. To meet her mortgage payments, Sam decides to take in boarders. The first is an older woman who offers sage advice and sorely needed comfort; the second, a maladjusted student, is not quite...

On a visit to Cincinnati from rural Kentucky during the Great Depression, Aunt Millie impresses Kit with her money-saving cleverness. Includes information on life in America during the Great Depression.

It is 1922, and london is tense. ex-service-men are disilusioned; the out-of-work and hungry are demanding change. in south london, in a genteel champion hill villa-a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants-life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow mrs. wray and her spinster daughter, frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. little do the wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course...

In 1934, Kit faces a very different Christmas because of her family's financial problems and allows her pride to estrange her from her best friend.

Tired of doing chores and longing for adventure during the Great Depression, Kit meets a hobo and decides to hop a freight train.

Mirette learns tightrope walking from Monsieur Bellini, a guest in her mother's boarding house, not knowing that he is a celebrated tightrope artist who has withdrawn from performing because of fear.

The plumbing was prone to leaks, the furniture rescued from garage sales. And every square inch was being devotedly restored to its original splendor-even as a relationship fell to pieces. Now Francesca Thayer, newly separated from her lawyer boyfriend Todd, is desperate. The owner of a struggling art gallery, and suddenly the sole mortgage payer on her Greenwich Village townhouse, Francesca does the math and then the unimaginable. She puts out an...

In 1934, during the Depression, Kit's cantankerous uncle comes to live in the Cincinnati boardinghouse run by her parents, enlisting her aid in transcribing his complaining letters to the editor of the local newspaper and inspiring her to write a different kind of letter of her own.