Cordelia Miller, an endearing young misfit in a scholarly, cultured family, loves junk food, TV, and the son of the local grocer. Her attempt to escape her stifling background and find her way in the world takes her on a classic journey from innocence to experience. She encounters a varied cast of characters—some comic, some calamitous—and, in the end, discovers her true vocation.

“Kitty Burns Florey seems to write from a great wellspring of inner calm that derives from a gleeful appreciation of life's smallest details.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls Once wildly popular in grammar schools across the country, sentence diagramming has fallen out of fashion. But are we that much worse for not knowing the word-mapping method? Now, in this illustrated personal history that any language lover will adore, Kitty Burns Florey explores the rise and fall of sentence diagramming, including its invention by a mustachioed man named Brainerd “Brainy” Kellogg and his wealthy accomplice Alonzo Reed ... the inferior “balloon diagram” predecessor ... and what diagrams of sentences by Hemingway, Welty, Proust, Kerouac and other famous writers reveal about them. Florey also offers up her own common-sense approach to learning and using good grammar. And she answers some of literature’s most pressing questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a better grammarian? What are the silliest grammar rules? And what’s Gertude Stein got to do with any of it?

Dorrie Gilbert, a potter who lives alone, is completely unprepared for motherhood when her oddball, overweight, and orphaned nephew, Hugo, comes to live with her, demanding to know the truth about his parents and horrified that she doesn’t own a television so he can watch the soap opera he’s devoted to. As Dorrie and Hugo attempt to work things out, each learns some hard and surprising, but deeply satisfying truths about real life.

Rosie Mortimer, celebrity gardener with a successful TV show, has a pleasantly uneventful life with her undemanding beau. Her gay son and his partner live nearby. When her estranged daughter, Susannah, product of a fractured family, returns to Rosie’s Connecticut town with her husband, a former priest, to open a restaurant, the tense relationships among these three build to a near-tragedy. Rosie is forced to face the mistakes and failures that have plagued her—and Susannah, who has her own demons, learns to forgive.

"A witty and readable (and fetchingly illustrated and glossed) excursion through the history of handwriting." —The Wall Street Journal Let a self-confessed "penmanship nut" take you on a tour of the strange and beautiful world of handwriting. Since her Catholic school days learning the Palmer Method, Kitty Burns Florey has been in love with handwriting, and can't imagine a world where schools forego handwriting drills in favor of teaching something called keyboarding. In this "winsome mix of memoir and call to arms" (Chicago Tribune), Florey weaves together the evolution of writing implements and scripts, pen-collecting societies, the golden age of American penmanship, and the growth in popularity of handwriting analysis, and asks the question: Is writing by hand really no longer necessary in today's busy world? "Charmingly composed and handsomely presented," Script & Scribble traces the history of penmanship to the importance of writing by hand in an increasingly digital age (The Boston Globe).