Central Kansas Library System

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.

In 1932, Kit faces a very different Christmas because of her family's financial problems and allows her pride to estrange her from her best friend.

It may seem strange to you that I was able to reach the age of fifty years and still have my face remain as smooth and hairless as a green melon, and you would be right. It is all but unheard of among the Nain for a boy to reach his fiftieth year without at least some sign that his beard is beginning to grow in. But then, this is certainly not the first thing about me that the rest of the Nain in the city of Vaarn think of as odd.

After a devastating loss, Brynn Wilder escapes to Wharton, a tourist town on Lake Superior, to reset. Checking into a quaint boardinghouse for the summer, she hopes to put her life into perspective. In her fellow lodgers, she finds a friendly company of strangers. But in this inviting refuge, where a century of souls has passed, a mystery begins to swirl. Alice knows things about Brynn, about all of them, that she shouldn't. Bad dreams and night whispers...

In 1934 Kit finds that she has hard lessons to learn about the Depression both at home, where she is helping her mother run a boarding house while her father looks for a new job, and at school, where a fight spoils the preparations for the Thanksgiving pageant.