The Anaswitch — Angie Baron

The AnaSwitch is the first instalment of a six-part fantasy entitled The Cloaker Chronicles, emulating the narrative styles of Lemony Snickett's A Series of Unfortunate Events and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Helanar Gatwick has no idea that she's living on the edge of two worlds. Her father has just died and she thinks she is a human named Ann Hare - but one can hardly call oneself human if one's mother is an Elf and one's father a Cloaker... When she finds an innocent-looking book and picks it up, she is whisked away to a strange, old mansion, where six creatures called Cloakers live. But their smiles and pleas of innocence disguise the magic they are bent on working, a magic they call a cure, although the cure brings death. Helanar must join forces with Vincent Valerio, Jasper Cadelle, Misty Hailstone, Dade Tetwick, Natasha Zink and Hallimond Small - a band of dynamic heroes, all with their own secrets and talents - to find the AnaSwitch, which is is missing, and which will mean the end of Helanar, its heir, if it is not found. Fans of young adult speculative and fantasy fiction will enjoy the fast-paced, yet intricately detailed magical world that greets them in The AnaSwitch. Readers will be able to identify with at least one of the heroes in the tale. With the complexity and imagination of Brian Froud and Alan Lee's Faeries and the romantic tension of Twilight, The AnaSwitch offers the reader a delightfully believable escape from the mundane. Readers will fly up the inside of a Faeri tree, view the magical contents of Misty's raincoat, meet a whole host of otherworldly characters and be plunged into a world filled with twists and turns reminiscent of the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix.