On Linden Square

While there are many books about building friendships, this one celebrates the creation of a community. —Booklist

It’s the first day of winter vacation and Stella Mae Culpepper is bored to tears. As she looks out from the window of her second-floor apartment, she can see all of the usual happenings on Linden Square, her city neighborhood. There are her neighbors. She knows them all by name—or by the names she’s given them, depending on their activities and what Stella Mae can see from her window. Stella Mae thinks she knows her neighbors but she doesn’t really. Everyone in the neighborhood is too busy minding their own business to pay much attention to anyone else.

But now it’s the first day of winter vacation and a storm is coming. Not just any storm but a big, wonderful winter storm. It’s a blizzard! And when the snow finally stops and Stella Mae ventures outside to play, something quite marvelous happens on Linden Square.

Kate Sullivan likes to play around with words, music, and pictures. She is a storyteller who uses a multimedia approach to touch audiences. A linguist by training (B.A. in French and Latin), she is also an award-winning composer and performer. Her one-woman theatre piece about Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill won the Independent Reviewers of New England prize and her Fugitum Est was premiered by The Kremlin Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. She has also given many solo performances, from Sculler’s Jazz Club in Boston to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in New York, always singing and playing anything from the piano to the musical saw. Kate has been painting for many years, everything from portraits and landscapes to cartoons. Her writings include a travel memoir, a screenplay, short stories, and poetry. Kate lives with her husband in Newburyport, Massachusetts, a little city on the ocean, where they enjoy a country mouse–city mouse life. On Linden Square is her first picture book for children.