A Kingdom of Iron and Wine (The Ironworld Series Book 1)

Avery Quinn lives in rural Nova Scotia. Her reclusive Aunt Tess has home-schooled her and raised Avery in a heavily sheltered upbringing. Not satisfied with her limited local opportunities, Avery and her friend Julie conspire to move to the big city to study after graduation. The bold move just happens to coincide with Avery’s eighteenth birthday, and when she starts getting nightmares and hallucinations, her world broadens in more ways than she could have imagined. Do vampires, fairies, and winged monsters really exist? Or is she a country girl in way over her head? There are plenty of secrets to uncover and the biggest of all is that Avery is not your ordinary human.

Avery’s awakening unfolds very slowly, little clues to the supernatural dropping into her path like crumbs in the forest. Candace Osmond’s imagination delivers fresh visions of diverse magical species, and cool pockets of hidden spaces that exist between our world, called Ironworld by the Fae, and Faerie, the world occupied by fairies, pixies, and nightmarish fae. At times, it seems as if the story keeps doubling back to the same characters for answers that they did not supply initially. Avery’s greatest threat may be the shadowy assassin stalking her for reasons unknown. It may be her new boyfriend, Cillian, who is hiding his true nature. Or it may be Avery herself, who is portrayed as uncommonly clumsy, foolishly prone to wandering into dark places, and incapable of intelligently processing new information. Readers will be kept in suspense just as Avery finds her bearings with Julie, Cillian, and her new supernatural friends. This lays the groundwork to a promising new series.

Joan Lai