College student David Rain rents a room in an unusual boardinghouse full of clay dragons, not realizing that they, along with some lively squirrels, will help jumpstart his writing career.

Rana Ramsey, a supermodel who has such a unique allure that its only fitting description is the "Rana Look," leaves modeling and her manipulative manager mother to live plainly and anonymously in Texas, but her disguise is threatened when she meets a man who loves her for herself and not her beauty.

On a visit to Cincinnati from rural Kentucky during the Great Depression, Aunt Millie impresses Kit with her money-saving cleverness. Includes information on life in America during the Great Depression.

In 1934, during the Depression, Kit's cantankerous uncle comes to live in the Cincinnati boardinghouse run by her parents, enlisting her aid in transcribing his complaining letters to the editor of the local newspaper and inspiring her to write a different kind of letter of her own.