"If your house were on fire, what one thing would you save? Newbery Medalist Linda Sue Park explores different answers to this provocative question in linked poems that capture the diverse voices of a middle school class"--

"Roberta, a lonely thirty-four-year-old bibliophile, works at The Old and New Bookshop in England. When she finds a letter inside her centenarian grandmother{u2019}s battered old suitcase that hints at a dark secret, her understanding of her family{u2019}s history is completely upturned. Running alongside Roberta{u2019}s narrative is that of her grandmother, Dorothy, as a forty-year-old childless woman desperate for motherhood during the early years...

Mole is content with very few possessions until his friend Emerson comes to tea and claims that he does not have nearly enough, and soon Mole has acquired so many things that he no longer has time to enjoy his life.