Age: 20
female
Mckenna Grace (born June 25, 2006) is an American actress and singer. Born in Grapevine, Texas, she began acting professionally at age five and relocated to Los Angeles, California, as a child. Her earliest roles included Jasmine Bernstein in the Disney XD sitcom Crash & Bernstein (2012–2014) and Faith Newman in the soap opera The Young and the Restless (2013–2015). After several small roles, she starred as a child prodigy in Gifted (2017), a breakthrough for which she received a nomination for the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer. Grace subsequently appeared in the films I, Tonya (2017), Troop Zero (2019), and Captain Marvel (2019). During this time, she appeared in several horror projects, including The Bad Seed (2018), The Haunting of Hill House (2018), and Annabelle Comes Home (2019). For playing the abused teenager Esther Keyes in The Handmaid's Tale (2021–2022), Grace was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series, making her the first child recognized for a guest acting Emmy. She appeared in the supernatural comedy films Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) as Phoebe Spengler, receiving critical praise and a Critics' Choice Super Award nomination. In 2022, Grace wrote, executive produced, and starred in The Bad Seed Returns, and portrayed Jan Broberg in A Friend of the Family. After signing with Photo Finish Records in 2020, Grace released her debut single, "Haunted House", in 2021, as part of the Ghostbusters: Afterlife soundtrack. She released two extended plays in 2023: Bittersweet 16 and Autumn Leaves, which explored pop rock and folk sounds, respectively. Description above from the Wikipedia article Mckenna Grace, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
