Laura Amy Schlitz

Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs, just like the heroines in her beloved novels, yearns for real life and true love. But what hope is there for adventure, beauty, or art on a hardscrabble farm in Pennsylvania where the work never ends? Over the summer of 1911, Joan pours her heart out into her diary as she seeks a new, better life for herself--because maybe, just maybe, a hired girl cleaning and cooking for six dollars a week can become what a farm girl...

Maud Flynn is "plain, clever, and bad," so it comes as a surprise when she's plucked from the Barbary Asylum for Female Orphans and adopted by the elderly Hawthorne sisters. Maud eagerly hopes to be pampered and cherished by the sisters, and life seems perfect -- until Maud learns of the role she has to play in the high-stakes "family business." Set in the early twentieth century, a drowned Maiden's Hair takes readers into the shadowy world of spiritualism...

Bound by destiny, Melisto and Rhaskos--Amber and Clay--never meet in the flesh. By the time they do, one of them is a ghost. But the thin line between life and death is just one boundary their unlikely friendship crosses. It takes an army of snarky gods and fearsome goddesses, slaves and masters, mothers and philosophers to help shape their story into a gorgeously distilled, symphonic tour de force.