Eva is very excited about a beach vacation with her family and best friend Lucy, but her secret fear of swimming where there might be hungry sharks could keep her from finding the legendary mermowls.

"A day at the community pool is full of unwater magic--dunking and diving with friends; somersaulting, walking on your hands, and bursting up through the surface like a tortoise. But when a thunderstorm comes and a little brother ventures too close to the pool's edge, will our main character be quick enough and brave enough to save the day?"-- Publisher's description.

Expelled from their secondary school in East Germany because of their rebellious attitudes, Hanna and Andreas plan to escape by swimming across the cold and choppy waters of the Baltic Sea in a harrowing twenty-five hour journey to freedom in West Germany--Hanna is an accomplished distance swimmer, Andreas is not, and the danger of being caught, drowning, or dying of exhaustion is very real, but the two teenagers are desperate to escape their lives...