"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that...

Uses engaging nonfiction text and hands-on projects to help young readers explore real-life bridge engineering projects, including the science behind how these structures are planned and built.

A single father gets an unexpected second chance at love in the heartwarming new novel from the author of The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper It’s summer in the city and passions are soaring along with the temperature—for everyone but Mitchell Fisher, who hates all things romance. He relishes his job cutting off the padlocks that couples fasten to the famous “love story” bridge. Only his young daughter, Poppy, knows that behind his prickly...

"In this wacky true tale of American ingenuity, Annie Miller took to raising pigs in the yard after losing all but her mansion, but when the town wanted the pigs out, she removed the whole mansion instead--rolling it away slowly on logs"--