From the "wonderfully quirky imagination" of the New York
Times-bestselling author: A tabloid reporter is surprised to find magic
in a mundane world (The New York Times).
Vera Pearl is a staff writer for This Week, a supermarket tabloid
which trades in the bizarre and the absurd--though rarely, if ever, the
true. No one is better than Vera at imagining these weird, wild stories,
because more than anything, she wants them to be real.
During one particularly slow week, Vera takes a photograph snapped by a
colleague showing two children selling lemonade outside their Brooklyn
home and drafts up a scoop to fit the snap, the story of two
enterprising children who have discovered--and are profiting off of--the
literal Fountain of Youth. By astonishing coincidence--or perhaps by
magic--the details she concocts about the children (except for the
properties of the tap water) turn out to be true, and hundreds of
miracle-seekers descend upon this modern Lourdes-in-Flatbush.
The resulting lawsuit sends this master of hoaxes into a very real
tailspin: she is fired, her estranged husband flies in from Los Angeles
to whisk away their precocious young daughter, and Vera takes off for
Arizona to attend a meeting of the Cryptobiological Society, hoping for
evidence of their furry quarry, Bigfoot. Just one glance, and Vera's
longing to finally transcend the quotidian may come true . . .
