The Runaway Weather-Maker (Ages 8–12)

Whistlecombe hasn't seen rain since spring. The apples are hard little marbles, the wells are running low, and the town clerk wants to knock down the old windmill and pave a coach park where it stands. Oscar Tibb, eight years old and too shy to speak up, hides in that windmill one afternoon and finds someone already living there: a round, whiskery stranger with forty-one buttons, a black umbrella, and shelves of bottled weather. Weather, it turns out, comes with rules — and consequences.