After a long pestering campaign, nine-year-old Anna and her younger brother Tom finally get a pair of hamsters, but when the pets are found mysteriously dead, the siblings and neighbor Suzanne launch an investigation throughout their neighborhood.

Jack and Annie travel in their magic tree house to Elizabethan London, where they become actors in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and try to rescue a tame bear.

Describes the day-to-day life of an early nineteenth-century New England family throughout the changing seasons.