Best Selling Books by Rumer Godden

The story treats the simultaneous events of wishing for love, in Ivy, a young orphaned girl, and Holly, a Christmas doll.

A young Gypsy girl is shunned by the children in her village because she lives in a covered wagon. And when her guardian great-grandmother dies, she must adjust to a new life and learn to accept life's inequities.

“Once upon a time there was a little mouse house. It was like a doll's house, but not for dolls, for mice.” Not proper mice, but a flannel He-Mouse and She-Mouse with beady eyes and bristle whiskers who stand quite still, propped on their hind legs in the sitting room. Mary knows real mice run and scamper, and disappointed with her new gift, she puts the mouse house away in her room. Meanwhile, down in the basement, a real mouse named Bonnie has been jostled out of her woefully inadequate flowerpot home by her older brothers and sisters. Overlooked by her harried parents and desperate for shelter, Bonnie ventures upstairs and finds the mouse house. And before too long what was a miniature make-believe house becomes a marvelously messy home for proper mice who know how to play, much to everyone's delight.

When little Nona is sent from her sunny home in India to live with her relatives in chilly England, she is miserable. Then a box arrives for her in the post and inside, wrapped up in tissue paper, are two little Japanese dolls. A slip of paper says their names are Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. Nona thinks that they must feel lonely too, so far away from home. Then, Nona has an idea - she will build her dolls the perfect house! It will be just like a Japanese home in every way. It will even have a tiny Japanese garden. And, as she begins to make Miss Happiness and Miss Flower happy, Nona finds that she is happier too.