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"Your children... Max and the unborn baby... they will achieve greatness. Together they will bring down the evil Syndicate and restore justice to our city."This is Great-Uncle Jacob's dying prophecy - a prophecy which Richard and Kayla Mandel have no idea whether to believe. But they do know one thing: they cannot let Richard's warped brother Alec, who has joined forces with the enemy Syndicate, anywhere near their two children. Thus Max and baby Alyssa are raised in hiding, locked away in their parents' cramped apartment, while the crime organization's evil hold on the city of Stonewall steadily increases.Fiery Alyssa can only stand her imprisonment so long. Determined to bring down the criminals who wrecked her childhood, she breaks free to rally a team of freedom fighters, launching a barrage of attacks against the stunned Syndicate. But mild-mannered Max is content to stay at home with his nose in a book.Then the Syndicate kidnaps Alyssa - and Max is the only one who can come to her aid. Will the family bookworm - aided and abetted by his dependable grandfather, along with new friend Jonny Roth and his deceptively little nephew - be able to rescue his sister and grow into his own? And will he and Alyssa make Great-Uncle Jacob's prophecy come true?

In this paper, we sought to document household income volatility as experienced by children over time, as one understudied aspect of household economic circumstances that might contribute to observed socioeconomic differences in children's achievement. Our analysis of six panels of the nationally representative Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) across a 25-year period reveal that income volatility may be an additional factor contributing to the gap between the achievement of rich and poor children: we find that households with children at the 10th percentile of income have experienced increasing volatility across the last 25 years while their affluent peers at the 90th percentile have experienced declining income volatility. Our sensitivity analyses show that these findings are robust to a number of differing analytic approaches and are not due to the changing racial/ethnic composition of lowincome households over this same time period.