A young girl from Brooklyn, New York, enjoys her summer at the beach where she can paint and listen to the wild waves.

A little girl visits the home and garden of Claude Monet at Gierny, France, and learns about the artist'spaintings and his life. The illustrations include photographs of the painter and his family as well as examples of his work.

"Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of the family he has yet to create, Bill buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life seems compelling and answerable, and they marry and have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial...

After Marvin, a beetle, makes a miniature drawing as an eleventh birthday gift for James, a human with whom he shares a house, the two new friends work together to help recover a Durer drawing stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.