Poet Kitty Clark has waited her entire life to see a total eclipse of the sun. News of an impending eclipse thrills her until she learns it will be visible only from Nantucket, where her ex-lover Joe Green recently moved with his new wife. Unable to resist the astronomical lure, she flies from Boston and makes her way to an isolated lighthouse, hoping to avoid Joe. The eclipse itself is overwhelming; Kitty screams when the sun vanishes behind the dark blot of the moon. When the sun returns a few minutes later, Kitty is standing over the bloodied body of Mrs. Joe Green, claiming "the moon did it."
Transcendentalist scholar and former detective Homer Kelly agrees to defend the troubled young poet, but the more Kitty insists she is innocent, the crazier she appears. To clear her name he must discover who set her up, and what happened during the two minutes when the Nantucket sun disappeared.
When arson and murder strike the Emily Dickinson symposium, Professor Homer Kelly decides to investigate the everlasting melodrama of human souls in conflict.
The citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, never tire of their heritage. For decades, the intellectuals of this little hamlet have continued endless debates about Concord's favorite sons: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and their contemporaries. Concord's latter-day transcendental scholars are a strange bunch, but none is more peculiar than Homer Kelly, an expert on Emerson and on homicide. An old-fashioned murder is about to put both skills to the test.
At a meeting of the town's intellectuals, Ernest Goss produces a cache of saucy love letters written by the men and women of the transcendentalist sect. Although Homer chortles at the idea that Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson might have had a fling, Goss insists the letters are real. He never gets a chance to prove it. Soon after he is found killed by a musket ball. The past may not be dead, but Goss certainly is.
The Transcendental Murder marks the first appearance for Langston's amateur sleuth Homer Kelly.
A Newbery Honor Book
An ALA Notable Book
A Children's Editors' Choice
It all started when Georgie, hardly more than a wisp of thistledown, discovered she could jump down twelve steps in two big graceful bounds. Next, to her great delight, she learned that jumping from the porch and floating as high as the rooftop was possible too. So when the mysterious Canada goose came to her window one night it seemed only natural to climb onto his back and go off with him to learn how to really fly.
Jane Langton spins a marvelous fantasy that wild delight all who dream that someday, somehow, we will magically find ourselves aloft and suddenly able to fly!
