After Hamelin picks up the story where the Browning poem and other tellings of The Pied Piper of Hamelin leave off. Told with a sense of adventure and humor, the author uses inventive wordplay and uninhibited imagination to spin a narrative tale through strange lands inhabited by characters both good and evil. Penelope is now 101 years old, but as a child she was struck deaf on her eleventh birthday, the day the Pied Piper stole the town’s children. Spared that fate, she accepts the quest to find the evil piper and bring the stolen children back. She tracks them through dangerous terrain, into the belly of a mountain, to a lost city. Before their adventure is over, Penelope and her companions use their wits and talents to rescue the missing children—standing against human, animal, and supernatural forces in order to triumph. "