Kids can handle a lot more than you think they can. It's when they get to be grown up that you have to start worrying.

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people—a great many people—who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better.

But if you were Charlotte, and you had been feeling that life was some cosmic joke that had no punchline, and in the space of a moment you had gone from being Charlotte-without-a-kitten to being Charlotte-with-a-kitten, you too would have found it nothing short of remarkable.

Her father said she was a princess. He did not see that she was a brave knight.

People feared snowstorms once. Hazel read about this all the time. Pioneers opened their front doors and saw they'd been entombed in snow overnight. They walked across malevolent swirling whiteness and did not know if they would survive. Nature can destroy us in a blink. We live on only at its pleasure. That was what looking at the witch was like.

This morning, as Charlotte approached the brick facade of Hartnett, she found herself overcome with a great sense of dread. It hit her with a strange and sudden force, and she had an overwhelming urge to turn back, get into bed and not go out for about three weeks. She stopped in her tracks. The feeling itself was alarming to Charlotte - was she sensing something? Something dangerous? And was it something supernatural or just middle school? Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems.