Nurk, a sort-of brave shrew, packs up a few pairs of clean socks and sails off on an accidental adventure, guided by wisdom found in the journal of his famously brave and fierce grandmother, Lady Surka the warrior shrew.

When mysterious men in black abduct his father, the court jester of Austerneve, thirteen-year-old Tymmon flees into the forest, where he acquires a strange animal companion and plots to rescue his father.

At his father's funeral, Edward Michael "Em" Goverton notices armed men have shown up, and these armed men follow him home. Em has discovered a five-hundred-year-old prophecy by Nostradamus, and these armed men work for men who are connected to that prophecy. With only a stranger named Victor and a family friend named Charlotte as allies, Em embarks on a quest to uncover a conspiracy and stop the end of the world.

Bound to keep a promise to her dead uncle, Is travels to the mysterious north country to find two missing boys, one of them a prince, and to discover why so many children in London are disappearing.

"Twelve-year-old Brine Seaborne and her friend Peter find themselves in an adventure with pirates, invisible bears, and a seriously evil magician"--

While dealing with dark revelations about her life and her world, Valkyrie Malin finds herself with new allies, and her quest for the truth leads her to places she never thought possible.

Yearning for life in a cloistered scriptorium, thirteen-year-old Princess Matilda, whose lame foot brings fear of the evil eye, escapes her scheming cousin Ivo and joins her servant Judith and an old friend, Parz, in hunting dragons and writing about them.

After his family is evicted from their Scottish farm, fifteen-year-old Roddy forms an unlikely friendship with a notorious rogue who helps him outwit a tyrant landlord in order to find a family treasure and make his way to America.

The outer crust is under attack by the subterranean Styx who are turning ordinary humans into walking bombs and incubators for their eggs, and only Will Burrows and his band of retired commandos stand in their way--but the Styx also have problems of their own.

"Fate intervenes when Ivy is called to the sickbed of a dying duchess and is charged with delivering a mystical (and possibly cursed) diamond necklace to the utterly revolting Matilda Butterfield for her twelfth birthday"--