Jan Eliot's funny and irreverent Stone Soup follows the saga of an extended, blended family, starring two working-mom sisters living just across the fence from each other. Val and Joan share life with their opinionated mother, a middle-school diva and 10-year-old tomboy, a reclusive teenage boy, a wild preschooler and his new baby sister… and of course Wally, the ultimate nice guy who steps into his stepdad shoes with grace amid the chaos. Working-parent hassles, pre-school tantrums, middle-school angst, love and the single mom… it's all here in Stone Soup.

In It's Hard to Be Holly, the angst of being an adolescent is felt through the hardships of actually having to work in school and, ugh!, going camping with the entire family!