When a drought tests the commitment of a mail-order bride from Maine to her new home on the prairie, her stepchildren hope they will be able to remain a family.

Shiori, princess of Kiata, has a secret: Forbidden magic runs through her veins. On the morning of her betrothal ceremony she loses control, and it forestalls the wedding she never wanted-- but it also catches the attention of Raikama, her stepmother. Using a dark magic of her own, Raikama banishes the princess, turns her brothers into cranes, and warns Shiori that with every word that escapes her lips, one of her brothers will die. Peniless, voiceless,...

Uncertain of where she really belongs, thirteen-year-old Nissa leaves her Louisiana home where she lives with her father and new stepmother and goes to stay with her eccentric mother in Chicago.

"Twelve-year-old Charlie and his friends must find out why their neighboring town has become overrun with sleepwalkers before what's going around reaches them and it's too late"--

Dawn and her best friend Sunny aren't speaking to each other -- until Sunny's mother comes home from cancer treatment to die.

The town of Opum Oppidulum is home to the freezing Lake Beluarum and its rumored monster. On an island at the center of the lake is an asylum from which no one has ever escaped. So how will Rex, whose father, Ambrose Grammaticus, has been imprisoned there under false pretenses, prove that Ambrose is not insane? And if Rex can free his father, will his evil stepmother drive them both to madness?

While still grieving for her mother and unable to accept her stepmother, a girl clings to the memories represented by forty-three buttons on a string.

Thirteen-year-old Sherry helps her mother, a ghost, to investigate who is stalking Sherry's stepmother, but Sherry is also very busy with school and friends, while her mother is also striving for a gold medal in the Ghostlympics.

Olivia becomes suspicious when her stepmother is acting more like a zombie than a vampire, while Ivy, her vampire twin sister, tries to discover why Maya, a new girl in town, is taking a special interest in her boyfriend.

In the early twentieth century in Swampsea, seventeen-year-old Briony, who can see the spirits that haunt the marshes around their town, feels responsible for her twin sister's horrible injury until a young man enters their lives and exposes secrets that even Briony does not know about.