Seventh-grader Zoey Albro focuses on caring for three younger siblings and avoiding rich classmates at school until her fascination with octopuses gets her on the debate team and she begins to speak out.

Four separate stories are interwoven: the fall of Babylon, the death of Christ, the massacre of the Huguenots and a contemporary drama, all crosscut and building with enormous energy to a thrilling chase and finale.

In 1990's Mexico City, a chaotic universe of extremes, where criminals go unpunished and policemen are as lawless as criminals, a heroine becomes the avenger of raped young women. Wearing different disguises, she seduces the rapists, narcotizes them and then brands them with tattoos. Her powerful enemies prepare an ambush to uncover her true identity. Her only salvation is the emancipation of another woman.

Told in two voices, sisters April, age sixteen, and Jenn, eighteen, have twenty-four hours to fulfill a childhood pact and deal with a secret that threatens to tear them apart.

"Thomas Gradgrind is the guiding luminary of the Coketown school, stern proponent of the Philosophy of Fact, whose ill-conceived idealism blinds him to the essential humanity of those around, with calamitous results. His daughter Louisa becomes trapped in a loveless marriage and falls prey to an idle seducer, and her brother Tom is ruined thanks to their father's pet theories. Meanwhile Sleary's circus offers a vision of escape and entertainment,...