In 1994, Fig looks back on her life and relates her experiences, from age six to nineteen, as she desperately tries to save her mother from schizophrenia while her own mental health and relationships deteriorate.
After her father dies, leaving sixteen-year-old Lacy with her much-loved stepmother, Lacy's birth mother suddenly shows up wanting Lacy back--and she will stop at nothing, not even dark magic, to control her daughter and draw her into her own twisted life.
"Fourteen year-old Eva tries to be a good disciple of Righteous Path, a polygamy cult in Colorado, but her forays into the 'heathen world' cause her to question all she knows"--.
Seventeen-year-old Sephora, a surfer and artist who loves fairy tales and mythology, struggles with a secret so horrible she cannot speak it aloud, especially not to her beautiful, single mother, although they have always been unusually close.
Kidnapped by her own mother, a Nazi spy, teenaged Wendy is transported from Maine to wartime Berlin, where she secretly supports the resistance movement and learns a family secret.
Eleven-year-old Ruby Danes has a real best friend for the first time ever, but agonizes over whether or not to tell her a secret she has never shared with anyone--that her mother has been in prison since Ruby was five--and over whether to express her anger to her mother.
Victoria Torres has always had a family birthday party that she shares with her beloved grandmother, but this year she is so impressed by her classmate's birthday party at GlamaRama, the mall's newest spa store, that she decides that she wants to celebrate her twelfth birthday there--and her mother refuses to do both.
