Eleven-year-old Hallelujah is fascinated by the fires burning all over the city of Chicago. Little does she realize that her life will be changed forever by the flames that burn with such bright fascination for her. The year is 1871 and this event will later be called the Great Chicago Fire. Hallelujah and her newfound friend Elizabeth are as different as night and day; but their shared solace will bind them as friends forever, as a major American city starts to rebuild itself.

For centuries after a devastating battle between the immortals, humanity has been protected from the Chaos realm by an invisible barrier known as the Legacy. But sealed behind the weakening barrier, the traitor Daemron makes one last, desperate bid for freedom: he casts his most deadly spell and curses four unsuspecting children. Born under the Blood Moon, they are destined to wield Daemron’s talismans of power, to either save the barrier – or bring it crashing down...

Ordinary people don't experience history as it is taught by historians. They live across the convenient chronological divides we impose on the past. The same people who lived through the Civil War and the eradication of slavery also dealt with the hardships of Reconstruction, so why do we almost always treat them separately? In Children of Fire, renowned historian Thomas C. Holt challenges this form to tell the story of generations of African Americans through the lived experience of the subjects themselves, with all of the nuances, ironies, contradictions, and complexities one might expect. Building on seminal books like John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom and many others, Holt captures the entire African American experience from the moment the first twenty African slaves were sold at Jamestown in 1619. Each chapter focuses on a generation of individuals who shaped the course of American history, hoping for a better life for their children but often confronting the ebb and flow of their civil rights and status within society. Many familiar faces grace these pages—Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama—but also some overlooked ones. Figures like Anthony Johnson, a slave who bought his freedom in late seventeenth century Virginia and built a sizable plantation, only to have it stolen away from his children by an increasingly racist court system. Or Frank Moore, a WWI veteran and sharecropper who sued his landlord for unfair practices, but found himself charged with murder after fighting off an angry white posse. Taken together, their stories tell how African Americans fashioned a culture and identity amid the turmoil of four centuries of American history.

The first man and woman are lonely. What to do? They decide to fashion children out of clay. As they are baking the little figures in their fire, they're constantly interrupted by visits from the sky-god, Nyame. As a result, some of the children are pale and underdone, some are left in so long that they come out very dark, and the rest are every shade between. Frane Lessac's gorgeous gouache paintings, inspired by West African masks and pottery, and Eric Maddern's vivid text make this one of the most compelling of creation myths for young readers.

In the first intstallment of the Dragon Safety Series, a dragon’s flame-filled tea party turns into a rhyming and reassuring lesson in fire safety.

Shirley Jackson meets "The X-Files" in this riveting novel of supernatural horror.