Lavatte family matriarch Barbara discovers the joys of a real love when she meets and marries Philip Carter, a Unitarian minister. When she returns from her honeymoon she faces a test that proves to be more challenging and harrowing than anything that has come before.

In seventeenth-century London, Meg, who has little interest in cooking, needlework, or other homemaking skills, dreams of becoming a bookseller and someday inheriting her widowed father's book store.

Troubled about being separated at school and preoccupied with sabotaging their father's marriage, ten-year-old witches, Claire and Luna, have little time to think of something good, smart and tricky to do that will finally make them one-star witches.