'Mrs. Churchill came to love Mother and she seemed fond of me and the animals; but she didn't like men. "Yer don't want to worry about them!" she would say with great scorn. If Father spoke to her, she would sniff in a sort of amused way and, as soon as his back was turned, mutter, "All right, all right, old moustaches." She was a great talker'

CONTENTS

Prologue
1 Mail-Order Gerbils
2 The Gerbil Whisperer
3 Even Girls Like Gerbils!
4 A Navy Man in Kansas
5 Doin' Time in Leavenworth
6 Trading My Bikini for a Horse
7 Dad Buys Himself a Gerbil Farm
8 Who's Going to Marry Her Now?
9 My Sister the Time Traveler
10 Welcome to the Poor Farm
11 Nobody's Business but Ours
12 Do It Yourself or Die Trying
13 The Man Without a Nose
14 My Mom Wears Jodhpurs
15 A Lady Always Wears Underpants
16 Saving the Blond Gerbil
17 Rebellions
18 What a Gerbil Farmer Does for Fun
19 The Gerbil Czar Retires
Epilogue The American Gerbil Show

"ON THE COOL OCTOBER MORNING when Cayetana Chávez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats.

On the big Santana rancho, the People had never seen paved streets, streetlamps, a trolley, or a ship. Steps were an innovation that seemed an occult work, stairways were the wicked cousins of ladders, and greatly to be avoided. Even the streets of Ocoroni, trod on certain Sundays when the People formed a long parade and left the safety of the hacienda to attend Mass, were dirt, or cobbled, not paved. The People thought all great cities had pigs in the streets and great muddy rivers of mule piss attracting hysterical swarms of wasps, and that all places were built of dirt and straw. They called little Cayetana the Hummingbird, using the mother tongue to say it: Semal."

"And so it was that Maju the Storyteller came to her new home. She was possessed of an intellect as sharp as the blade of a newly honed knife, and a beauty so terrible only a few could bear to look upon it. But Maju herself had never had to pass the test of gazing upon her own features. For she was as it was whispered all the truly great drabardi are:

Maju the Storyteller was blind.

The vizier and Maju lived quietly in their quarters in the king's great palace. In the second year of their marriage, Maju presented the vizier with a child. A daughter. They gave to her the name of Shahrazad."

"Trees. Keelie Heartwood didn't think her life could be more depressing than it already was, but the sight of the green forest before her made her feel gray inside. She could already feel the tingling of her allergic reaction. Wood of any kind made her feel sick, but living trees were the worst."

"What are you doing here?" she said.

I could feel the crimson rising like tequila suns in my cheeks. "Um, I had something for your mom."

"What?"

"A book."

...

I picked up the smallest one, a paperback of the Nichomachean Ethics, and carried it to her.

"My mother wants to read Aristotle?"

"Well, I don't know. We were just talking about it."

"Aristotle?"

'"I'm hot."

"It's dry heat. Don't you love it?"

"I hate the sun. Why live in the meteorological equivalent of a smiley face?"

"You're such a stiff, Ethan."'

"Ramblings of a madwoman might be deadly. The same words, spoken in sanity: treason. This truth I have discovered to my woe. Yet, imprisoned within my cell, I find it hard to discern the difference. What is truth? What is lie? God alone knows, for by my soul, I do not. Still, death silences all. And death waits for me beyond this vaulted chamber, its walls etched with the words of prisoners who came before me. Their names haunt me; their pleas for mercy mock me, letters chipped into stone during endless hours."

'Anne smiled and handed Caro her cup. "And yet it did not stop her from making a good match. Your father was besotted."

"It was an intemperate match," Caro said.

"And your father was besotted," Anne said with a grin.

"And my father was besotted," Caro reluctantly agreed.

"The same could happen to you and for you. You are your mother's daughter."

Yes and no, and that was the problem. She was Sophia's daughter, the daughter of a former courtesan, and therefore her pedigree was a disaster. And, yet, though she was Sophia's daughter, she had none of her fire, certainly none of her mystique, and most definitely none of her experience.'

"He didn't know what to make of that, so he turned his mind sharply to the file he had on the Stokes family and the few things it told him about Melanie Stokes. Daughter, adopted at the age of nine after being abandoned at the hospital where Dr. Stokes worked. A bit of a media buzz portraying her as a modern-day Orphan Annie. She'd graduated with a B.A. from Wellesley in '91 and was active in various charitable organizations. One of those I-want-to-give-something-back-to-the-world kind of people. Nine months earlier she'd become engaged to Dr. William Sheffield, her father's favorite right-hand man, then ended it a mere three months later without ever giving a reason. One of those my-business-is-my-business kind of people. She helped take care of her mother, who, as Larry Digger had pointed out, had never been the same since the murder of her first daughter. One of those you-mess-with-my-family-you-mess-with-me kind of people. Whatever."

"A magnetic return to the polar people"

-- The Independent

"I was very young when we came to America," Megan said, waving a hand. "We moved west in search of gold in 1849. We were nearly to the gold fields when my father was killed by an Indian."

"Indi--what is In-di-an?"

"Savage people that lived in America before white people came. They fought us hard to keep their land. And they lost."

"The school uniform had changed since the years when Kate attended. Twenty-five years ago, the girls wore dark green tartan, a color that accentuated the striking red hair of his tall, rawboned daughter. Twenty-five years ago, Sister Mary Elizabeth would clang a handbell and Kate and her friends would freeze on the spot, the class clowns twisting into exaggerated poses. On the second bell, they'd line up with their respective classes, two by two. On the third, they'd march to their rooms. All this was accomplished in thirty seconds, in total silence.

Silence had fallen out of style long before the tartan jumpers."

"When she was old enough to learn, her father began to teach her the art of making fireworks. She began with little Crackle Dragons, six on a string. Then she learned how to make Leaping Monkeys, Golden Sneezes, and Java Lights."

"Being selected for this scholarship changed me. Even though I grew up in an extremely rural area and was a butcher’s daughter, I competed against hotshot city and suburban kids and won. I won!"

"Mean things were said--by both of them--and Megan shuddered when she recalled how pleased she'd felt with that last wicked remark about killing babies. Why did it make her feel so good to make her mother feel so bad?"