"My mama became a catfish when I was two, on the day I stopped talking." Neglected since birth by her mother, Irina Myshko hasn't spoken a word for most of her short Soviet life. Outcast as a mute idiot and abused by her mother's boyfriends, she escapes into an alternate reality where true natures show and people are revealed as the beasts they are. Pregnant, homeless, and penniless, Irina has to make a choice - learn to live in this splintered world or descend into madness.

Of all of the naughty, mischievous, disrespectful, and downright horrible things that children can be, a badling is perhaps one of the worst. Badlings abandon books without finishing them, leaving their characters sad and lonely-not to mention angry. Meet Bells, Peacock, Rusty, and Grand, four ragtag friends convicted of this monstrous crime. As punishment, they get sucked into a book of unfinished stories, whose patchwork pages they must traverse...and read to the end this time.

Chase Madison had a tough childhood. Raised in a broken home and struggling with undiagnosed ADHD, he was constantly in trouble, injured, and outcast. Life didn't get much better as an adult. Jailed, abandoned by family and friends, and fired from his job, Chase walks through life looking for the next bad thing to happen. But then he meets the Caelans. They look like and act like us, but they are not from this planet. They've lived here for years, posing as people of Earth, hiding in plain sight by using a mental ability called 'psy' to influence us-purely for the purpose of maintaining their secret identity. They have always been completely and utterly peaceful. Their planet had conquered and eradicated anger long ago. Something has suddenly changed, however, within the Caelan people here on Earth. After more than 50 years of peace, anger has infected some of them-like a sickness-forcing all 939 to be quarantined here. And when they meet Chase, they discover something even more disturbing-their psy does not work on him. His immunity to their power presents a serious security risk. On the surface, there doesn't seem to be anything special about him-other than having ADHD. Could this unusual condition be responsible for such a serious breach of Caelan security? Join Chase on the adventure of his life as he makes wondrous discoveries, improbable friends, terrifying enemies, finds unexpected love, and begins to believe in himself-for the first time in his life.