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When we meet Caley Cross in her first adventure, Caley Cross and the Hadeon Drop (due out September 8), she’s living a fairy-tale life. Only it’s the first part of that life, where you’re an orphan being raised in an abusive orphanage. This doesn’t make her particularly popular at her middle school, nor does her tendency to reanimate dead animals when she’s upset.
After one such incident, a mysterious crow with a metal wing spies her and seems to say “Found you.” She is soon whisked off to a magical world called Erinath, where she is the highest of high princesses in the land and is enrolled in a school where kids learn to manage the magic of this world and others.
Being whisked away to somewhere new where you’re someone special is a popular storyline in middle-grade fantasy books, and Caley Cross hews close to the norms of the genre: the friends you make right away who are true to you even when you’re awful, the mean girl who wants to embarrass you, the secrets in your past, the preternatural skill at something you’ve never experienced before, the fluttery romantic feelings you’re beginning to feel, and others.
But author Jeff Rosen’s world is wholly its own. In Erinath, you bond with a living being (your “beast”) as a child, and that shapes your magic and your life in unique ways. Caley Cross bonds with a dark…
