When a scheming lord tears Jess's family apart, she must rely on her unlikely friendship with Kal, a high-ranking Patron boy, and her skill at Fives, an intricate, multi-level athletic competition that offers a chance for glory, to protect her Commoner mother and mixed-race sisters and save her father's reputation.

When Caroline Oresteia, seventeen, finally has a chance to be a wherryman, she gets caught in a web of politics and lies, with her father's life at stake.

Barack Obama tells the story of his life as the son of a black African father and a white American mother, searching for a workable meaning to his life as an African American.