"Mama, I just know something wonderful is going to happen today," Emily said.
     "I can feel it in my bones."
      Mama laughed. "Adventure is pretty scarce here in Pitchfork. I think your imagination is running away with you."

Imaginative Emily Bartlett is lucky in many ways. She lives happily in the small town of Pitchfork with her parents, in a big house on the family farm. Sometimes, however, it can get a little lonely:

     The Bartlett front porch was inside the town limits, but the rest of the house, and the barn and fields, were in the country, and there was no one near for Emily to play with.

Emily decides that things would be better if she had more books to read. Her cousin Muriel, who lives in Portland, is always writing to Emily about books, and Emily feels that she is "not lucky like Muriel, who could ride a streetcar downtown to a big library full of hundreds, even thousands, of books." So Emily decides that what Pitchfork really needs is a library.

     "Suppose Pitchfork had a library with one hundred thousand books!"
     "There goes your imagination again," said Mama.

But is this idea just a product of Emily's runaway imagination, or could it really be made to happen ...?