Lost Flower Children - Softcover

Janet Taylor Lisle was born in Englewood, New Jersey, and grew up in Farmington, Connecticut, spending summers on the coast of Rhode Island. The eldest and only daughter in a family of five children, she was educated at local schools and at fifteen entered the Ethel Walker School, a girl's boarding school in Simsbury, Connecticut.After graduation from Smith College in 1969 with a degree in English literature, she enlisted and was trained for work in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). She lived and worked for the next two years in Atlanta, Georgia, organizing food-buying cooperatives in the city's public housing projects and teaching in an early child-care center. Catalyzed by this experience, she enrolled in journalism courses at Georgia State University with the idea of writing about the poverty she had seen. This was the beginning of a reporting career that extended over the next ten years.With the birth of her daughter in 1977, Lisle turned to writing projects that could be accomplished at home. In 1984, The Dancing Cats of Applesap, her first novel for children, was published. Subsequently, she has published ten other novels.

Satomi Ichikawa, creator of the Nora books, lives in Paris, France.

In the overgrown beds of a neglected garden, two sisters listen to the whispers of flowers and learn to love and trust again. When their mother dies, Olivia, nine, and Nellie, five, are taken by their father to live, temporarily, with their great-aunt Minty. Olivia is protective of Nellie, whose rules and rituals must be enforced in order to maintain the peace. After Aunt Minty discovers a blue teacup in her once-splendid garden, Olivia stumbles across a story written by the former owner of the house, in which a group of children were turned into flowers by evil fairies during a tea party. The similarities between the story and the garden are too pronounced to be ignored, and Olivia and Nellie resolve to find all the tea cups in the garden, and then the teapot, hoping to reverse the spell in the tale; in the process, Nellie is transformed from a rule-obsessed child into a more normal state. Olivia suspects that Aunt Minty is behind all their discoveries, but is finally happy to relinquish her caretaker role. Ichikawa's black-and-white pencil drawings capture the impish look of the wicked fairies, the delicate detailing of the tea set, and the drowsy heads of overlooked blossoms. Signs that the enchantment will continue are written into the ending, in a tale that seamlessly weaves the longings of two motherless children with the possibilities of the imagination. (Fiction. 9-12) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.