"What is beautiful anyways? Is it the color of someone's skin or eyes? Their height? The way they dress? What is it?" I asked, not really expecting an answer. "I think beautiful is someone who looks past the exterior and gives people a chance. Someone who tries to understand another. An unselfish being. Someone who doesn't see with their eyes but their heart," he replied playing with the bracelet around his wrist, "That truly is a beautiful thing." Celeste has been called beautiful all of her life. She is convinced that guys only want to go out with her because that's all they say they like about her. She's beautiful. To graduate Celeste needs thirty-five hours of community service. She decides to answer an ad in the paper for a temporary aide for a blind teenager, Seamoore. With their new found accidental friendship, Seamoore opens Celeste's eyes that seeing isn't just with your eyes. © Somethingtrue 2013. All rights reserved.

From National Book Award finalist and Printz Award winner Laura Ruby comes an epic alternate history series about three kids who try to solve the greatest mystery of the modern world: a puzzle and treasure hunt laid into the very streets and buildings of New York City. It was 1798 when the Morningstarr twins arrived in New York with a vision for a magnificent city: towering skyscrapers, dazzling machines, and winding train lines, all running on technology no one had ever seen before. Fifty-seven years later, the enigmatic architects disappeared, leaving behind for the people of New York the Old York Cipher-a puzzle laid into the shining city they constructed, at the end of which was promised a treasure beyond all imagining. By the present day, however, the puzzle has never been solved, and the greatest mystery of the modern world is little more than a tourist attraction. Tess and Theo Biedermann and their friend Jaime Cruz live in a Morningstarr apartment-until a real estate developer announces that the city has agreed to sell him the five remaining Morningstarr buildings. Their likely destruction means the end of a dream long held by the people of New York. And if Tess, Theo, and Jaime want to save their home, they have to prove that the Old York Cipher is real. Which means they have to solve it.

In 2004, my young son was diagnosed with leukemia. This is the gritty, soul-baring recollection of my years as a "cancer mom". Come with me as I tell the story of daily struggle, juxtaposed with memories and flashbacks of my own childhood, experiences, and marriage.

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