The carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour of a chill Midwestern October eve. Ushering in Halloween a week before its time, a calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Young boyhood companions James Nightshade and Will Halloway are the first to heed its call. From a place of safety, they watch a midway come to spectral life, their emotions a riot of eagerness, trepidation, bravado,...

Left alone to guard the family's wilderness home in eighteenth-century Maine, a thirteen-year-old boy is hard-pressed to survive until local Indians teach him their skills.

"In a city where Fire, Water, Earth, and Air people reside together, a fiery young woman and a go-with-the-flow guy are about to discover something elemental: how much they have in common"--