Janet Taylor Lisle's novels for young readers include five selected as Best Books of the Year by the School Library Journal: Sirens and Spies, The Lampfish of Twill, Forest, A Message from the Match Girl (one from the investigators of the Unknowwn series), and Afternoon of the Elves, a Newbery Honor Book. Her most recent novel is the The Lost Flower Children.

She lives with her family on the coast of Rhode Island, near the setting for The Art of Keeping Cool.

Chapter One There are people in this world who are naturally open and easy to get to know, and there are difficult people, the ones who put up barricades and expect you to climb over them.Elliot Marks was the second kind of person. The first time I saw him, he was standing outside without a coat on in the middle of a freezing New England February, mopping his nose and looking up into the bare limbs of a tree, staring up as if something amazing was there. Nothing was, or not that I could see anyway."Who is that?" I whispered to my mother.We had just arrived at my Grandpa and Grandma Saunders' house in Rhode Island, a place we'd never visited before. My mother had brought me and my five-year-old sister, Carolyn, east from our farm in Ohio to stay in Sachem's Head while our father was away fighting. She'd been lonely by herself, and found it hard to keep the farm running with just me to help. When Grandma Saunders wrote to say a cottage had come empty next door on Parson's Lane, and why didn't she bring the children and live there, my mother went right out and bought our train tickets. It shocked me how fast she did it."What about Dad? He expects us to stay here," I protested."I'll write him. We'll get the post office to forward his letters until then," she answered."Who wants to live In a cottage when we already have a whole house?""It's on the ocean. There's a beach nearby. Carolyn will like that.""But, what about the farm? Are you just going to let it go down?""I'll lease out the fields I can," she said. "I would've had to do that anyway. Where was I going to find hired help with every able-bodied man enlisted in the service?""Well, what about the hogs? You can't leave them!"After we moved cast, I used to wake up in the mornings with a picture in my mind of our old house, of how the fields spread out flat in all directions around it, and the sky streamed over it like a great river, sometimes deep and blue, sometimes muddy, stirred tip, racing with clouds."There's wing room out here," my father used to say, dredging up an old term from his test pilot days. His eyes would look out across a field he'd just plowed, then come back to me squeezed in beside him on the tractor."Plenty of room to wag your wings when you need to," he'd say.I'd never flown in an airplane but I liked the idea of having wing room. I liked being on my own, working by myself. I had friends but didn't have to be close-in with people every minute of the day. There was a kind of strength in knowing you could stand by yourself. My father had it, I knew that. It was what had brought him to Ohio in the first place, to buy land and start the farm. Now it was what had sent him over to England ahead of everybody else to fight the Nazis.My father had a bad leg. He walked with a hitch in his stride, the result of a plane crash that had nearly killed him before he met my mom, he said. But he never let it stop him from doing what he wanted. He never talked about it or made excuses, and if his limp stood out in people's minds in the beginning, they'd forget it as they got to know him. That leg just didn't go with the rest of him. Most of the time, he seemed to forget it, too, because every once in a while he'd try to jump a brook or climb a ladder too fast and he'd fall. Afterwards, he'd pick himself up and go on without a word, even if he was hurt. From the look on his face, I'd know not to say anything either.Of course, I knew my mother could stand alone, too. Her parents had died when she was a baby and she had to live with relatives growing up. She'd learned how to fight for herself by the time she met my father in Cincinnati. They planned out the farm together, built the house, cleared the fields. She'd worked right along with him, and cared as much, but:"We'll sell the hogs...and the chickens," she answered me that day, so fast I could see she'd been thinking of something like this fo