A Most Unusual Girl Confronts Dark Magic in Serafina and the Twisted Staff

Serafina has always lived in the idyllic Biltmore estate, home of the fabulously wealthy Vanderbilts, but not for her are its gilded 19th century luxuries. Instead, Serafina lives down in the basement with her father, who keeps the mechanics of the place operational. And although, after saving Biltmore from the magic of the black cloak in her first adventure, she could be part of the daylight life of the estate, she instead prowls at night, keeping her hunting skills in practice and visiting her mother, a shapeshifting catamount—sometimes human, sometimes mountain lion.
On one such nightly prowl, Serafina witnesses a gray-bearded man with a twisted staff arriving in a coach drawn by four wild stallions. This sinister man senses her presence, and sends five savage hunting dogs after her. She only escapes with her life because a wild boy she’s never met before comes to her aid. Serafina takes her responsibilities as Biltmore’s protector seriously, but she can’t help but feel horribly outmatched by the man with staff and the animals he can control. And when his dark magic threatens her friendship with her friend and comrade in adventure, Braeden Vanderbilt, she flees to the wild hills. There she finds the heart of the horror wrought by the twisted staff, a threat to all the folk of her home, both human and animal.

Serafina is not only struggling to combat supernatural evil, but also to find her place in the world. She desperately wants to be able to shift into cat form, like her mother, though her mother has warned her this might never happen. And she’s become uncertain whether Braeden still wants to be her friend; after all, she is still wild, not exactly human, and not at all civilized, especially when compared with Lady Rowena Fox-Pemberton, the lovely young visitor who is taking so up much of Braeden’s time. Fortunately, Braeden has not changed, and it’s with his help that Serafina uncovers the secrets of the twisted staff and its power, and the old story at its heart, which is tied to the creation of the Biltmore and its beautiful landscape.
(One aside—the wild boy who helps Seraphina is also a catamount, who identifies himself as Cherokee, linking the shapeshifting in the story to Native American cultural traditions. If you’d like to read about another shapeshifting panther boy, I highly recommend How I Became A Ghost, by Tim Tingle, a Choctaw author who draws on his own culture in his storytelling.)

For those who are thinking of getting this one for an animal lover, on the plus side, Serafina does find her shapeshifting form, and this is something young readers will love, as it opens up the possibility that she could live in the wild, like her mother and the boy who helped her. On the down side for animal lovers though, some animals are badly hurt, and some killed. This heightens the tension of the story, but it might be upsetting for sensitive readers. The book ends with the evil being laid to rest in a sufficiently convincing way that the scariness can be put aside, but it is pretty scary while it lasts!
The twin tensions of a supernatural evil and an unusual girl trying to figure out who she is and who she wants to be (and very realistically; not necessarily coming to any sort of final conclusions), are beautifully balanced. There’s also more than enough action to keep things moving briskly, and enough introspection to make the characters, especially Serafina, real and interesting. The Biltmore estate is almost a character in its own right, and once a reader has devoured these books, they will almost certainly want to go visit to see it for themselves.
Serafina and the Twisted Staff is in stores now.