"With the rise of the Berlin Wall, twelve-year-old Gerta finds her family suddenly divided. She, her mother, and her brother Fritz live on the eastern side, controlled by the Soviets. Her father and middle brother, who had gone west in search of work, cannot return home. Gerta knows it is dangerous to watch the wall, to think forbidden thoughts of freedom, yet she can't help herself. She sees the East German soldiers with their guns trained on their...

In the country of Carthya, a devious nobleman engages four orphans in a brutal competition to be selected to impersonate the king's long-missing son in an effort to avoid a civil war.

From the assassination that triggers World War I in 1914 to Armistice Day in 1918, the story follows the fates of five young people on both sides of the conflict--each facing their portion of the war with courage, until the end of the war brings them together. Includes information on the history of the war.

In 1942 sixteen-year-old Chaya Lindner is a Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Poland, a courier who smuggles food and documents to the isolated Jewish ghettos in southern Poland, depending on her forged papers and "Aryan" features--but when a mission goes wrong and many of her colleagues are arrested she finds herself on a journey to Warsaw, where an uprising is in the works.

When Nic, a slave in the mines outside of Rome, is forced to enter a sealed cavern containing lost treasures of Julius Caesar, he finds himself in possession of an ancient amulet filled with magic once reserved for the Gods, and becomes the center of a conspiracy to overthrow the emperor and destroy Rome.

Twelve-year-old Hazel Rothbury stows away aboard the Titanic and, with the help of a porter named Charlie and a first-class passenger named Sylvia, she sets out to explore the great ship, uncovering a haunting mystery--until the ship hits an iceberg and she must fight to save herself and her friends.

When King Jaron returned to Carthya he brought with him a device that supposedly shows the way to a great treasure, but now everything is going wrong: Castor, the son of an old enemy, is conspiring against him and wants the throne for himself, his fianc, Imogen, seems to have turned against him, and the Prozarian Monarch has invaded his kingdom and taken Jaron's castle--but Jaron has a lot of experience at hiding and escaping, and he is not willing...

After three years in exile Kestra Dallisor has been summoned back to Antora by her father, right-hand man of the seemingly immortal king, Lord Endrick, but she is intercepted and kidnapped by the Coracks who want to use her to get the Olden Blade, which they believe can be used to kill the despot--Simon, one of the rebels with his own grudge against the Dallisors, is assigned to accompany her, but Kestra has her own plans and she does not intend to...

Now firmly on the side of the Coracks, sixteen-year-old Kestra Dallisor plans to use the magic Olden Blade to kill the evil Lord Endrick, but when she fails, Endrick turns her into one of his Ironheart soldiers, without any memory of her rebellion, and bound to obey him, his spy within the Coracks; the rebel Simon is desperate to return her to the Kestra he loves, but he is reluctant to use the magic that might heal (or destroy) her--and neither Simon...

Nicolas Calva has Caesar's magic bulla, the Malice of Mars, and he has hidden the dangerous Jupiter Stone, but he still has to find a way to defeat The Mistress, a dragon who contains the soul of the vestalis Atroxia, and who hates Rome, and save his mother and friends, and maybe even the Empire itself--and he is troubled by his sneaking sympathy for Atroxia, who was unjustly condemned.