Lindsay Eagar

"While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina Carol is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she's never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge. But as the summer wears on and the heat bears down, Carol finds herself drawn to him, fascinated by the crazy stories he tells her about a healing...

"Fished from the river as an infant and raised by a roving band of street urchins who call themselves the Crowns, eight-year-old Duck keeps her head down and her mouth shut. It's a rollicking life, always thieving, always on the run -- until the ragtag Crowns infiltrate an abandoned cathedral in the city of Odierne and decide to set down roots. It's all part of the bold new plan hatched by the Crowns' fearless leader, Gnat: one of their very own will...