At a family reunion, Shelley comes to terms with her parents' divorce, her mother's absence, her new stepmother, and being the "stable" member of her colorful family.
The members of two families have their lives disrupted when a teenage girl who had been kidnapped twelve years earlier discovers that the people who raised her are not her biological parents.
Taken from her home on an Aegean island as a six-year-old girl, Anaxandra calls on the protection of her goddess while she poses as two different princesses over the next six years, before ending up as a servant in the company of Helen and Paris as they make their way to Troy.
Six high school juniors discover surprising, often painful, things about themselves and their relationships with the people around them in the diaries they are asked to keep as a three-month English assignment.
Althea, a nobody and ignored by others at school, wants to be a cheerleader to be popular. Then she meets a strange person in a dark circular tower who promises Althea that he can make her populer, for a price.
Annabel and Daniel meet at a high-society party and are instantly drawn to each other by a love so strong it threatens to overwhelm them, but Annabel knows their families share a dark and violent secret that makes their love forbidden.
Mariah decides to sign up for "Night Class" after Andrew, the boy she has a crush on, says that he will sign up. But Mariah is soon terrorized by this class and wishes she could escape from it before it is too late.
When Cathy decides to carpool from Norwalk to Greenwich, Connecticut, to study Latin in summer school, she does not expect the shocking events that occurred five years earlier to come flooding back into her relatively settled life.
