If the kids filled up an exercise book to the end with words, they would get a dollar fifty each. She recounts that most of the kids enjoyed telling stories and their father would pay them for writing. She had four sisters and a brother, and their home had two dogs and a dozen chickens. The author was raised in Sydney, Australia. She is known for writing novels for young adults. More a complex adult family drama tinged with magic realism than a traditional young adult novel, this will appeal to sophisticated readers with an offbeat sense of humor.Jaclyn Moriarty is an Australian published author of fiction. Because the individual stories are so diverting, the mystery subsides in importance until the climax, where all is explained, if not exactly resolved, in true postmodern form. Meanwhile, things are going quite savagely for Listen in junior high her friends have cast her off and she can't seem to make new ones, a situation that she assiduously hides from her father and Marbie, and she can't see, though readers can, that her spells are working. Despite their predilection for adultery, the adult characters are quite likable they have childlike fears of rejection and hurt, as well as strong desires to please and be pleased. Cath is having an affair with a married man, for instance Marbie is cheating on Listen's father and Fancy imagines that her husband is having an affair and contemplates the possibility of one herself. Thus the plot is a postmodern panoply more familiar to readers of adult fiction, as will be many of the themes. Interwoven with Listen's story are plot threads that involve Marbie's sister, Fancy, Fancy's daughter, Cassie, and Cassie's second-grade teacher, Cath Murphy, along with various tales of the pioneers of balloon travel. Meanwhile, she's getting to know the entire Zing family: they meet once a week for dinner, and then the adults disappear into the shed to discuss the Zing Family Secret, which somehow involves lots of high-tech surveillance equipment and some breaking and entering. It's a bossy little thing, with instructions for spells that must be completed in a certain order at a certain time, and stern warnings against turning pages prematurely. Amid the clutter of boxes that fills the little house where Listen Taylor and her father have moved in with Marbie Zing, her dad's girlfriend, Listen finds a strange book.

The spell book of listen taylor