"When Gwendy Peterson was twelve, a mysterious stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous. Pushing any of its seven colored buttons promised death and destruction. Now, evil forces seek to possess the button box and it is up to Senator Gwendy Peterson to keep it from them. At all costs. But where can you hide something from such powerful entities?

When Grace takes boxes of old buttons from a building her grandfather bought, she starts a fad at school that draws her closer to one friend, but further from another.

A linen sheet, smooth with age. A box of buttons, mother-of-pearl and plastic, metal and glass, rattling and untethered. A hundred-year-old pin, forgotten in a hem. Fragile silks and fugitive dyes, fans and crinolines, and the faint mark on leather from a buckle now lost. Claire Wilcox has worked as a curator in Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum for most of her working life. Down cool, dark corridors and in quiet store rooms, she and her colleagues...