Ana Dakkar is a freshman at Harding-Pencroft Academy, a five-year high school that graduates the best marine scientists, naval warriors, navigators, and underwater explorers in the world. Ana's parents died while on a scientific expedition two years ago, and the only family's she's got left is her older brother, Dev, also a student at HP. Ana's freshman year culminates with the class's weekend trial at sea, the details of which have been kept secret....

In alternating chapters, eighteen-year-old Darcy Patel navigates the New York City publishing world and Lizzie, the heroine of Darcy's novel, slips into the "Afterworld" to survive a terrorist attack and becomes a spirit guide, as both face many challenges and both fall in love.

Mina is excited to start her mentorship at A Batch Made in Heaven, a bakery famous throughout Washington State for their unique cookies, because she would like to become a baker herself, and she wants to enter the cookie competition in Seattle to win money to help her father open a restaurant to replace the one he left behind in Delhi; but she is soon frustrated because the owner's annoying son, Flynn, will not even let her near the kitchen--clearly...