Recent immigrants from China and desperate for work and money, ten-year-old Mia Tang's parents take a job managing a rundown motel in Southern California, even though the owner, Mr. Yao is a nasty skinflint who exploits them; while her mother (who was an engineer in China) does the cleaning, Mia works the front desk and tries to cope with demanding customers and other recent immigrants--not to mention being only one of two Chinese in her fifth grade...

Iris Cooper has been singing ever since she can remember, hitting the high notes like no one else. When she is twelve, her father convinces the owner of a bar in Lake City, Texas, to let her perform, and she stuns the audience. In the ensuing years, never staying anywhere for long, father and daughter move from one dusty town to the next, her passion for music growing every time she takes the mike in another roadhouse. But it is not an easy life for...

"For fifteen years August Sitwell has worked for the Barclays, a well-to-do white family who plucked him from an orphan asylum and gave him a job. The groundskeeper is part of the household's all-black staff, along with “Miss Mamie,” the talented cook, pretty new maid Jennie Williams, and three young kitchen apprentices - the latest orphan boys Mr. Barclay has taken in to "civilize" - boys like August. But the Barclays fortunes have fallen, and...

New York, 2061: The place called the Pleasure Academy is a living nightmare where abducted girls are trapped, trained for a life of abject service while their souls are slowly but surely destroyed. Dorian, a thirteen-year-old runaway who'd been imprisoned there, might never have made it out if not for her fellow inmate Mina, who'd hatched the escape plan. Mina was the more daring of the two--but they'd been equally desperate. Unfortunately, they didn't...

Searching for her buried friend after the mines collapse, twelve-year-old Pakistani mica miner Nura finds herself at the Sijj Palace, a luxury hotel for the dangerous and deceitful jinn, where she must discover the truth beneath the glitter or be trapped forever.

"In 2007, Saket Soni received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to 20,000...

Charlotte Rowe spent the first seven years of her life in the hands of the only parents she knew--a pair of serial killers who murdered her mother and tried to shape Charlotte in their own twisted image. If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit--until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled. Just when she thinks she has buried her personal...

Struggling songwriter Dave Seville opens his home to a talented trio of chipmunks named Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. When they become overnight music sensations, a greedy record producer tries to exploit the 'boys.' Now Dave must use a little human ingenuity and a lot of 'munk mischief to get his furry family back before it's too late