There's power in a book...

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they're sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There's Rose, a hippie who insists she's going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby's father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they're allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what's best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it's never given freely. There's always a price to be paid...and it's usually paid in blood.

Dictionary wishes she could tell a story like other books. So one day, she decides to bring her words to life. How exciting it is to finally have an adventure on her very own pages! But what will she do when her characters collide and everything gets all in a jumble, causing the most enormous tantrum to explode? This isn't what she wanted at all! Luckily her friend Alphabet knows exactly what to do and sings a song that brings calm and order to Dictionary's pages once again.
 

Birdie's keeping it together; of course she is. So she's a little hungover, sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she's getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie, he represents everything she's ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well.

Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains, on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It's just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it's idyllic and she can picture a happily ever after: Together they catch salmon, pick berries, and climb mountains so tall it's as if they could touch the bright blue sky. But soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have ever imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.

Black Woods, Blue Sky is a novel with life-and-death stakes, about the love between a mother and daughter, and the allure of a wild life--about what we gain and what it might cost us.

They've loved each other in a thousand lifetimes. They've killed each other in every one.

Evelyn can remember all her past lives. She can also remember that in every single one, she's been murdered before her eighteenth birthday by Arden, a supernatural being linked to her soul. The problem is that she's quite fond of the life she's in now, and her little sister needs her in order to stay alive. If Evelyn wants to save her sister, she'll have to find the centuries-old devil who hunts her through each life before they find her first, figure out why she's being hunted and finally break their curse, and try not to fall in love . . . again.