Central Kansas Library System

In this tongue-in-cheek take on classic themes in children's literature, the four Willoughby children set about to become "deserving orphans" after their neglectful parents embark on a treacherous around-the-world adventure, leaving them in the care of an odious nanny.

Mrs. Pidgeon has been reading Aesop's fables to her second grade class. What's a fable? Well, it's a story that has animals as characters, and it teaches you something important, and... Once again it is Gooney Bird Greene who knows how to turn lessons into fun. She has an idea. A fabulous idea! What if each child creates his or her own fable, and tells it to the class? One by one Mrs. Pidgeon's students create costumes and stories and morals and excitement....

Thirty years after their disappearance, the previously frozen Willoughbys have thawed out and returned from the Alps, to the consternation of their children and grandchildren.

Sam Krupnik, mad at his mother because she won't let him wear his new plastic fangs in the house, decides to run away to Alaska.

Mrs. Pidgeon's second grade class studies poetry and her students write haiku, couplets, free verse, and finally, a tribute to Mrs. Pidgeon's mother organized by the irrepressible Gooney Bird Greene.

Mouse Mistress Hildegarde musters all her ingenuity to keep a large colony of church mice safe from the exterminator and to see that they make it through the dangerous Blessing of the Animals.

Forced to spend a summer with their father and his "new" family, Caroline, age eleven, and J.P., age thirteen, are given unpleasant responsibilities for which they are determined to get revenge.