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The last thing a fourteen-year-old boy expects to find along an Ozark river bottom is a tree full of monkeys. Jay Berry's grandpa had an explanation, of course-as he did for most things. The monkeys had escaped from a circus, and there was a handsome reward in the store for anyone who could catch them. Grandpa said there wasn't any animal that couldn't be caught somehow, and Jay Berry started out believing him.

But by the end of "the summer of the monkeys," Jay Berry Lee had learned a lot more than he ever bargained for- and not just about monkeys. He learned about faith, and wished coming true, and knowing what it is you really want.

This novel, set in rural Oklahoma around the turn of the century, is a funny and heartwarming family story about a time and place when miracles were really the simplest things.

Up until Jay Berry was fourteen years old, no other boy on earth could have been happier. He didn't have a worry in the world. But, just when things were really looking good for him, something happened. He got mixed up with a bunch of monkeys. Those monkeys all but drove him out of his mind. He should have kept this monkey trouble to himself, but he got his grandpa mixed up in it. He even coaxed Rowdy, his old blue tick hound, into helping him with his monkey trouble.

At the time, the Lee family was living in a brand-new country that had just been opened up for settlement. They had moved there when Jay Berry was only two years old. He and his twin sister, Daisy, were born in Oklahoma City. He was born healthy, but Daisy came out with here right leg all twisted. She was going to be a cripple. The farm they lived on was called Cherokee Nation. It lay in a strip from the foothills of the Ozark Mountains to the banks of the Illinois River in northeastern Oklahoma. That was probably the last place in the world that anyone would expect to find a bunch of monkeys.

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