Toward a Secret Sky by New York Times bestselling author Heather Maclean is a new breed of YA novel: an intelligent adventure-quest crossed with a sweeping, forbidden love story. A mix of reality and possibility, this fast-paced thriller will appeal to fans of Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown as it leads the reader on a breathless flight through the highlands of Scotland, the secret city under London, and history itself. "Five Stars! Mysterious, romantic, and totally fun! Toward a Secret Sky is the type of adventure I could lose myself in over and over again." - Stephanie Garber, author of Caraval Shortly after 17-year-old Maren Hamilton is orphaned and sent to live with grandparents she's never met in Scotland, she receives an encrypted journal from her dead mother that makes her and everyone around her a target. It confirms that her parents were employed by a secret, international organization that's now intent on recruiting her. As Maren works to unravel the clues left behind by her mother, a murderous madness sweeps through the local population, terrorizing her small town. Maren must decide if she'll continue her parents' fight or stay behind to save her friends. With the help of Gavin, an otherworldly mercenary she's not supposed to fall in love with, and Graham, a charming aristocrat who is entranced with her, Maren races against the clock and around the country from palatial estates with twisted labyrinths to famous cathedrals with booby-trapped subterranean crypts to stay ahead of the enemy and find a cure. Along the way, she discovers the great truth of love: that laying down your life for another isn't as hard as watching them sacrifice everything for you.

It is October 31st. The orange harvest moon has no moonbeams. In the stables, horses feel uneasy when scary creatures appear in the night sky. Four kittens are born. One is abandoned by her mother because she is not suitably dressed in black for a Halloween ride on a broomstick. A loving horse rescues the tiny creature, no bigger than a mouse, and she is named the Mousecat. The Mousecat has most unusual eyes, which enable the strangest, scariest, and most wonderful things to happen when she goes on her own Halloween sky ride with the Moonicorns and moonicorn fairies. How could it be possible for such a tiny creature to experience so much in one dark, dark night?Could this amazing adventure be a dream? Maybe, but the next night, the moon notices the bow of a violin near a pumpkin patch. An old skeleton, in his hurry to reach his coffin before sunrise, had dropped the bow. People and animals also noticed it, and left it there. A year later, after the next Halloween night, it was gone.A sequel to The Moonicorn Fairies, this book once again combines fact and fantasy using Classical music, storytelling, and art.

"If colonial America was the melting pot of modernity, it was because it was also a fabulous laboratory of images. . . . Just as much as speech and writing, the image can be a vehicle for all sorts of power and resistance." So writes Serge Gruzinski in the introduction to "Images at War, "his""striking reinterpretation of the Spanish colonization of Mexico.""Concentrating on the political meaning of the baroque image and its function within a multicultural society, Gruzinski compares its ubiquity in Mexico to our modern fascination with images and their meaning."
" Although the baroque image played a decisive role in many arenas, especially that of conquest and New World colonization, its powerful resonance in the sphere of religion is a focal point of Gruzinski's study. In his analysis of how images conveyed meaning across linguistic barriers, he uncovers recurring themes of false images, less-than-perfect replicas, the uprooting of peoples and cultural memories, and the violence of iconoclastic destruction. He shows how various ethnic groups--Indians, blacks, Europeans--left their distinct marks on images of colonialism and religion, coopting them into expressions of identity or instruments of rebellion. As Gruzinski's story unfolds, he tells of Aztec idols, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, conquistadors, Franciscans, and neoclassical attempts to repress the baroque. In the final chapter he discusses the political and religious implications of contemporary imagery--such as that in Mexican soap operas--and speculates about the future of images in Latin America.
Originally written in French, this work makes available to an English audience a seminal study of Mexico and the role of the image in the New World.