One stormy June evening, five friends meet at Villa Diodati, the summer home of Lord Byron. After dinner is served, they challenge each other to tell ghost stories that will freeze the blood. But one of the guests Mary Shelley is stuck for a story to share.
A new boy in school, the arrogant, aloof, and irritatingly handsome Darcy de Winter, becomes Emma’s unlikely ally as secrets are revealed and danger creeps ever closer.
Whose eyes are these? Each spread in this magnificently illustrated book starts with a pair of mysterious eyes and a fun response to the question, and then children are off to discover just who is hiding—in its natural setting. Children can plunge into the colorful ocean and find the jellyfish, fly among beautiful flowers to catch the dizzy hummingbird, and delve into the woods after a prickly hedgehog.
Noah Keller has a pretty normal life, until one wild afternoon when his parents pick him up from school and head straight for the airport, telling him on the ride that his name isn’t really Noah and he didn’t really just turn eleven in March. And he can’t even ask them why not because of his Astonishing Stutter, but because asking questions is against the newly instated rules.
Zoe isn’t the intellectual type, which is why she doesn’t recognize world-famous author Thomas Rocher when she stumbles into his apartment…and into his life. It’s also why she doesn’t know that Rocher is supposed to be dead. Rocher faked his death years ago to escape his critics, and has been making a killing releasing his new work as “lost manuscripts,” in cahoots with his editor/ex-wife Agathe. Zoe doesn’t know Balzac from Batman, but she’s going to have to wise up fast… because she’s sitting on the literary scandal of the century.
Twelve-year-old Cassie Arroyo is a student in Rome, but her life changes when a secret organization, the Hastati, shoots her father–and she learns that she is a member of an ancient bloodline that enables her to use the Spear of Destiny, a legendary object that can alter the future.
Journeyman toymaker Stefan Drosselmeyer is recruited by his mysterious cousin, Christian, to find a mythical nut that will save Boldavia’s princess and his own kidnapped father from a fanatical Mouse Queen and her seven-headed Mouse Prince, who have sworn to destroy the Drosselmeyer family.
Mary Quinn has a lot on her mind. James Easton, her longtime love interest, wants to marry her; but despite her feelings, independent-minded Mary hesitates. Meanwhile, the Agency has asked Mary to take on a dangerous case: convicted fraudster Henry Thorold is dying in prison, and Mary must watch for the return of his estranged wife, an accomplished criminal herself who has a potentially deadly grudge against James. Finally, a Chinese prizefighter has arrived in town, and Mary can’t shake a feeling that he is somehow familiar.
Four linked stories of discovery and survival begin with a Paleolithic-era girl who makes the first written signs, continue with Anna, who people call a witch, then a mad twentieth-century poet who watches the ocean knowing the horrors it hides, and concluding with an astronaut on the first spaceship from Earth sent to colonize another world.
An introduction describing the frustration we feel when we lose something is followed by a catalogue of misplaced objects. Each item is shown first in its original form and then, through a series of gatefold spreads, is shown in the process of transforming into a marvelous and mysterious sea creature. At the very end of the book, we see these transformed objects in their new, watery habitat, a conclusion which will leave readers astonished by the distance they — like the lost objects themselves — have travelled.