Janet Graber Libros

Malcolm, an orphaned field mouse, is considered a nuisance by his house-mouse relatives who live at 65 Rodent Row, Mouse-Town Estates, in the gloomy basement of Balmoral Castle. He is a misfit who does poorly at school and is bullied by his cousins. While house mice serve as collectors within the castle walls, Malcolm yearns to follow in his daddie’s paw-steps and become an explorer of the outside world. While collecting in the royal kitchen one afternoon, Malcolm is discovered by Chief Castle Cook. In his mad dash to escape, Malcolm inadvertently exposes the MI Mouse-Way Ramp 3 to human eyes. Disaster strikes! Royal staff board up mouse holes and bait traps with poison. Mouse-Town Estates is threatened with death and starvation. Malcolm seizes the opportunity to try to save the house-mouse community and to explore the outside world at the same time. Will Malcolm survive four fat royal corgis, being trapped in the royal handbag, arrest, and imprisonment to save the day? Or will Her Majesty the Queen succeed in chopping off his head?

The year is 1665. Fourteen-year-old Gwendoline Riston lives in the village of Letchlade on the upper reaches of the River Thames. Her puritan neighbors have long whispered about Gwendoline - her way with animals, her skill with plants, especially her pale skin and white hair. They believe she is a witch. But her father says she looks like an angel here on earth, and her friend Jack is a loyal companion when the village folk shun her.When a terrible plague hits London, threatening the countryside, no one is safe. The villagers blame Gwendoline. "Purge the pale one!" they cry. If that weren't cause enough to be frightened, Gwendoline's friend goes missing and her father sets out to search for him, leaving her hidden away in a secret chamber above the porch at St. Giles Church to keep her safe. With only a meager supply of food, Gwendoline must summon all her courage to survive through the long, hot summer.

Georgina is on a visit to her widowed father in England to celebrate his seventy-seventh birthday, decades after he fought in WWII. She is astonished when he asks if she will accompany him back to Trieste, in Northern Italy. He has always refused to set foot in Europe again. What changed? And why now? Captain James Drummond survived the battlefields of North Africa and Italy. Instead of his anticipated return home to wife and four-year-old daughter whom he had yet to meet, he was assigned to the grim task of military occupation in Trieste. On a summer patrol in 1945 in the disputed hills above Trieste, he encountered a group of Yugoslav partisans, bathing. When he glimpsed a woman emerging from the pool, water cascading down her body, a new conflict emerges with no clear lines, one he had to navigate alone. The war-weary Captain was faced with heart-wrenching choices. Meanwhile, Georgina faces her own demons-- a stale marriage, a secret affair, and her father's new revelations. Weaving historical facts with fictional characters, The Sting of Love moves seamlessly between Georgina's tumultuous life and that of her father in the aftermath of WWII, viewed through the lens of their several weeks together in Trieste.