After a violent rainstorm, eleven-year-old Emma finds a curled leaf carrying a waterlogged spider egg sac. She brings it inside, expecting only to keep it safe until the danger has passed.
Then the spiderlings hatch.
Most disperse into the garden, but one tiny jumping spider remains. Emma names her Spider and begins to observe her carefully-what she eats, how she hunts, why she uses silk, whether she can learn, and perhaps even whether she dreams.
With help from her irrepressible younger brother Bobby, her patient science teacher, and a family slowly adjusting to life with a bedroom spider, Emma builds Spider a proper habitat and records every discovery in her nature notebook. The more she learns, the more Spider becomes not a curiosity or a pet, but a small, intelligent wild creature with needs and choices of her own.
When spring returns, Emma must face the hardest lesson of all: loving a wild thing may mean letting it go.
Warm, funny, scientifically curious, and quietly moving, Spider's Dream is a story about observation, responsibility, growing up, and learning that even the smallest lives contain worlds we may never fully understand.
In the tradition of Charlotte's Web comes a new story for children about Emma, who asks the question do spiders dream? A budding young scientist asks her science teacher for help raising a tiny spiderling. On her journey she asks many questions, gets some answers, and learns that spiders do all kinds of things, and are not scary at all.