13-year-old Remy DuMont, newly arrived from Haiti, where his family lived in poverty, hopes that life will be different in West Oakland, California, where refrigerators, hot running water and television are but three new wonders. But when he and his parents move into the second-floor apartment of a spooky old Victorian house in a neighborhood haunted by real-life terrors of gangs, drugs and violence, the last thing Remy expects are ghosts Every night at 3:13 while his mother and father sleep, Remy hears a train approaching, seemingly headed straight for the house. From his window he sees a...

Some might say that 14-year-old Brandon Williams is an over-privileged snowflake. He lives in a million-dollar house overlooking the ocean in Santa Cruz, California, gets a weekly allowance equal to the take-home pay of many service industry workers, and has gone to a private, all-white school from Kindergarten through eighth grade. Health-nazis call him "obese," but to most normal people he's simply chubby, and handsome by Caucasian standards. Brandon should be happy -- or at least think he is -- but he's not. Like many young teens he's sure there must be a "there" somewhere that's better...

13-year-old Mike Carver, raised by his novel-writing dad in the nice suburban environment of Thousand Oaks, California, is dismayed when his father's uncertain income forces a move to a tumbledown shack in the seemingly desolate sweltering desert of Coyote Valley, Arizona. The property, such as it is -- electricity unreliable, and only a windmill for water -- was left to Mike's dad by Mike's great-uncle, who died at the age of 107 after spending most of his life searching for a ton of gold bars stolen in a train robbery in 1897 and reputedly still buried somewhere near the robbery site....

Enter what is an alternative universe to most of America, a West Oakland, California neighborhood, circa 1990, where 13-year-old Ryo is luckier than many kids because he has a mother, Tracy, who loves him, and an extended family of father-figure, Brownie, a Vietnam War combat veteran, and "grandfather" Jon, a World War II Merchant Marine sailor. Ryo also has a loyal best-friend, Chipmunk. And, Ryo has a dream of becoming an airplane pilot. Still, he cannot remain unaffected by a seemingly hopeless environment from which there appears to be no escape, doomed to be grounded forever without the...

Tracy Carter seems to be living the African-American Dream, her forty acres a lavish home in the Oakland, California foothills, her mule a $70k Land Rover. She has an eclectic but practical education, the means to indulge her passion for art; and at age 33 owns a successful boat-building business. So why does her story begin in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere? Is she on a mission to save children? Is she searching for her ancestral roots? ...Or, could she be on an unconscious quest for something much deeper, something long-buried in vine-tangled graveyards and shrouded in...