“ . . . and they lived happily ever after." Remember the fairy tales you put away after you found that no princess is as beautiful as common sense and happy endings are just the beginning?Well, the old tales are back, and they've grown up! Black Pearls brings you the stories of your childhood, told in a way you've never heard before. Instead of lulling you to sleep, they'll wake you up—to the haunting sadness that waits just inside the windows of a gingerbread cottage, the passion that fuels a witch's flight, and the heartache that comes, again and again, at the stroke of midnight.Make no mistake: these stories are as dark as human nature itself. But they shine, too, lit with the fire of our dreams and our hunger for magic.

Sarah is forced to take a summer poetry class as penance for trashing the home of a famous poet in this fresh novel about finding your own voice.Sarah's had her happy ending: she's at the party of the year with the most popular boy in school. But when that boy turns out to be a troublemaker who decided to throw a party at a cottage museum dedicated to renowned poet Rufus Baylor, everything changes. By the end of the party, the whole cottage is trashed—curtains up in flames, walls damaged, mementos smashed—and when the partygoers are caught, they're all sentenced to take a summer class studying Rufus Baylor's poetry...with Baylor as their teacher. For Sarah, Baylor is a revelation. Unlike her mother, who is obsessed with keeping up appearances, and her estranged father, for whom she can't do anything right, Rufus Baylor listens to what she has to say, and appreciates her ear for language. Through his classes, Sarah starts to see her relationships and the...

Selected as the first Book in Common at Mississippi University for Women, this compelling story helped trigger campus-wide discussions on race relations and child abuse. Lonely Feena Harvey, a teenager who cannot stand by and watch bad things happen, sees a toddler being slapped and kicked, then abandoned by his mother. When Feena kidnaps the baby to save him, she finds an unlikely ally in Raylene Watson, popular, outgoing, and African American. The two girls, miles apart, socially and emotionally, skip school to take care of Christopher. But how long can this mismatched pair of guardians keep their secret? Especially once the police join the search for the baby?