Franny Hansen is a 10-year-old piano prodigy living in Rusty Nail, Minnesota. Once the Coot Capitol of the world, in 1953 it’s just a run-of-the-mill town with one traffic light and a bizarre cast of characters. She’s long exhausted the talents of the town’s only piano teacher and seems destined to perform at church events and school assemblies, until a mysterious Russian woman arrives in Rusty Nail. Franny’s neighbors are convinced the "Commie" is a threat to their American way of life, but Franny’s not so sure. Could this stranger be her ticket out of Rusty Nail?
Lesley M. M. Blume returns with the poignant and laugh-out-loud funny story of one girl’s attempt to pursue the American dream in small town America.
“Blume has skillfully combined humor, history, and music to create an enjoyable novel that builds to a surprising crescendo.”—School Library Journal
Author
Lesley M. M. Blume
About the AuthorLesley M. M. Blume is an author, journalist, and historian based in Los Angeles. She is the author of several critically acclaimed middle-grade novels, including Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters, The Rising Star of Rusty Nail, Julia and the Art of Practical Travel, and Tennyson, which the Chicago Tribune praised for its “brilliant, unusual writing.”Blume’s adult nonfiction book Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises documented the lives of Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and the Murphys in France in the 1920s and was a New York Times bestseller. Her second adult non-fiction book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, received glowing reviews and was called “magisterial” by The New York Times Book Review.
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