Alison Jackson

The old woman who lives in a shoe sets out to find a larger home for her many children, and gets mixed up in other nursery rhymes along the way.

Thea Teawinkle plants an odd, purple, bean-shaped seed in her front yard for her class science project, with astonishing results that even the experts she writes to--including a botantist, an arborist, a museum curator, and a symphony director--cannot offer any explanations for.

Upon finding a large gold nugget on her pig farm, Desert Rose sets out to buy the biggest, fattest hog in Texas to enter in the state fair, but first she must get the hog to Laredo and every animal she asks for help is just as "ornery" as the hog.