The incredible artwork of an Italian immigrant who followed his dream of monumental proportions in the impoverished Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles is revealed in this fascinating and engaging true story. A Reading Rainbow selection! Simon (Sam) Rodia had no formal engineering or architectural training. Yet, over the course of three decades, he constructed an artistic masterpiece in his own backyard - the Watts Towers. Using all kinds of things other people had thrown away, such as broken bottles and tiles, pieces of mirror and glass, seashells, and bits of pottery, he adorned the collection of 17 interconnected sculptural towers. His imaginative salvaging and perseverance can be seen today, as people from all over the world still come to marvel at Sam's dream.

When his wife died, Teddy Oliver inherited a fortune and a family-three teenage daughters as eccentric as money, a doting father, and living on the San Francisco Peninsula could make them. The story bisects the mythological subculture of California-a mix of studied freedom of ideas, dress, "lifestyle," and sex. ." Patricia Zelver's humor is like a kitten hiding behind the sofa waiting to dart out and take a couple of slaps and dash back in. Her stories make me do what I practically never do, laugh out loud (what's to laugh at most of the time?)."-Wallace Stegner

." Patricia Zelver's humor is like a kitten hiding behind the sofa waiting to dart out and take a couple of slaps and dash back in. Her stories make me do what I practically never do, laugh out loud (What's to laugh at most of the time?)." -Wallace Stegner The stories in "A Man of Middle Age" are all distinctive, befitting a five-time winner of O. Henry Prize Story Awards. "Patricia Zelver created Same Winkle, a man of middle age, with style and masterful economy in the title novella. It is a minor classic." -"San Francisco Chronicle"

The three girls were a tight trio-known as The Honey Bunch when they were in high school-never again allowed to be free from their mystique. Through the years-marriage, divorce, adultery and religious conversion, they were always The Honey Bunch.

..".Patricia Zelver's humor is like a kitten hiding behind the sofa waiting to dart out and take a couple of slaps and dash back in. Her stories make me do what I practically never do, laugh out loud (what's to laugh at most of the time?)."-Wallace Stegner