The Bright Idea

Lydia Smith, a clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, calls the lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store's overwhelmed shelves "BookFrogs." When Joey Molina, a young BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore's upper room, he bequeaths his meager worldly possessions to her. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for man. But they seem to contain a hidden message. As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joey's suicide, she unearths a long buried memory from her own violent childhood.

"Your leadership blueprint for business success."

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Sandra Kring's A Life of Bright Ideas. Wisconsin, 1961. Evelyn “Button” Peters is nine the summer Winnalee and her fiery-spirited older sister, Freeda, blow into her small town–and from the moment she sees them, Button knows this will be a summer unlike any other. Much to her mother’s dismay, Button is fascinated by the Malone sisters, especially Winnalee, a feisty scrap of a thing who carries around a shiny silver urn containing her mother’s ashes and a tome she calls “The Book of Bright Ideas.” It is here, Winnalee tells Button, that she records everything she learns: her answers to the mysteries of life. But sometimes those mysteries conceal a truth better left buried. And when a devastating secret is suddenly revealed, dividing loyalties and uprooting lives, no one–from Winnalee and her sister to Button and her family–will ever be the same.

Ruby is determined to win the gold with her fifth-grade science fair project, a Rube Goldberg machine to help her grandfather, but the real prize turns out to be something completely unexpected.

Retells, in tall-tale fashion, how Levi Strauss went to California during the Gold Rush, saw the need for a sturdier kind of trouser, and invented jeans.

THE STORY: How far would you go for your child? For Genevra and Joshua Bradley, the question is no longer hypothetical. Their three-year-old son, Mac, is next on the waiting list to get into the Bright Ideas Early Childhood Development Academy--and

A secret tore best friends Evelyn “Button” Peters and Winnalee Malone apart. Now, nearly a decade later, a secret brings them back together. Nine years ago Button and Winnalee began recording observations in their Book of Bright Ideas, a tome they believed would solve the mystery of how to live a mistake-free life. Now it’s 1970, a time of peace, love, war, and personal heartbreak. Button’s mother is dead and her grieving father has all but abandoned his children. Quiet, thoughtful Button has traded college for a sewing job in her mother’s bridal shop to help her Aunt Verdella raise her whirlwind six-year-old brother. In Button’s free time, she writes letters to the boy she loved from afar through high school, hoping he will come to love her as more than a friend. Then, like that magical Wisconsin summer of ’61, Button is greeted with the wild, gusty arrival of Winnalee. Now a beautiful flower child, Winnalee is everything Button is not. She’s been to Woodstock and enjoys “free love,” but their steadfast bond of friendship is tested as Button begins to notice the cracks in Winnalee’s carefree façade. And then Winnalee’s mother arrives with a surprise that Button never sees coming, and the fiery determination to put things right in both families once and for all.

Deep in the shade of a walnut grove stands a tall tree that houses the Walnut Animal Society. Henry is a founding member, an inventor, and a tinkerer. Today Eleanor the bear and Henry search for his lost idea, but discover much more.

The Bright Idea Series are stories based on Mr. Watts—a light stand that magically comes to life. He lives in apartment number 4, where he befriends and advises the children that pass through. Mr. Watts assists them in finding solutions to their problems and helps them to see how each family is special. At the end of each story, the reader is invited to share their Bright Idea for today.

A retired Arizona cop, Scott Riker, lives with his wife and daughter in Quebec City where he heads a group of problem-solvers. Directed by Quebec business mogul and philanthropist, Luc Duchesne, the group uses their talents and resources to stand between people in trouble and the criminal elements who would do them harm. In Her Book of Shadows, Riker agrees to find a teenage girl, Jodie Burke, whose parents say ran away to Quebec City from Connecticut. When Jodie's friend turns up murdered on the Plains of Abraham, however, it becomes clear that Riker faces something more than just a runaway girl. He races to find Jodie and prevent whoever is trying to kill her from succeeding.