On her sixteenth birthday in 1936, Sophia begins a diary of life in a fictional island country off the coast of Spain, where she is among the last descendants of an impoverished royal family trying to hold their nation together on the eve of the second World War.

"It's 1918, and war is raging across Europe. When Lady Mina Tretheway receives a telegram at boarding school, she doesn't want to read it--telegrams never bring good news. The message is written in a cryptic code, and Mina is soon pulled out of school and into a secret wartime mission with a dashing American spy" -- Provided by publisher.

In 1943, in a seaside town where their family has gone to be safe from war, thirteen-year-old Max Carver and sister, fifteen-year-old Alicia, with new friend Roland, face off against an evil magician who is striving to complete a bargain made before he died.

Riya and Abby were best friends in their small California town, but Riya and her family moved to Berlin for Riya's junior year and it was hard to stay in touch; so now that the year has passed, Riya purposes that they take a two week Grand Tour and travel around Europe to reconnect--but the trouble is that they have both been hiding secrets, and those secrets threaten to push them apart forever.