Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Stories

In these twelve modern myths and tales for the young and the young at heart, Jane Yolen transforms the impossible into the familiar and real. Among the outlandish wonders are an Alice grown tough in Wonderland, a dear—but dead—mother’s homecoming, a bridge that longs for a goat-eating troll, and a mutiny among Peter Pan’s troops.

The collection follows a young girl defending a tiny fairy baby from an army of stinging ants in an overgrown garden. Yolen sets an ordinary boy on a bicycle against ravenous alien invaders along a suburban path.

Another story strands a determined Scottish lad on the open sea with a brother-killing dragon hooked to his fishing boat.

• Urban Fantasy: In a futuristic Manhattan, teenagers undergo temporary DNA shifts to roam Central Park as animals, but running collarless leaves one girl hunted by a human predator.
• Spooky Stories: A teenage baby-sitter relies on a secret hallway ritual of spun turns and tapped doors to protect twin six-year-olds from the horrors lurking in their Victorian home.
• Mythology: After an apartment fire destroys a family’s belongings, an unburned nest on the stairwell yields a pulsing gray-green egg that hatches into a scarlet creature of flame.
• Sibling Dynamics: Danny empties his late father’s ashes onto the compost heap, and his older sister stays awake to guard his bedroom against the whispering shadows outside.
• Also by This Author: Encounter, Johnny Appleseed and The Young Merlin Trilogy.