Laura Black, 17, left her small Pennsylvania hometown in 1937 for New York City with the goal of obtaining her mage license and becoming a famous baker. She’s down to a couple of dollars and about to get evicted when she reluctantly accepts a government job as apprentice to the Skylark, the woman who’s head of the NYC Colored Auxiliary of the U.S. Bureau of the Arcane’s Conservation Corps. Government policy strictly controls the practice of magic, favoring a branch called Mechomancy (industrial, exploitative) over Dynamism (grounded in the natural world), although Dynamism practitioners like those at the Colored Auxiliary are relied on when things go wrong. Soon Laura, with the new name Peregrine, is on a mission with Skylark and others to the Ohio Deep Blight Zone, where something is wiping out the resonators needed to amplify Mechomancy’s reach. They find ghost towns, destruction, deadly shadows, and forces of white supremacy determined to raise a Norse god. To stop them, Peregrine must draw on the skills she learned growing up in her Black community, skills that she calls Craft (outlawed by the government) as well as power she didn’t know she had. The riveting plot, captivating characters, and original world-building hang neatly on real-life history in this smart historical fantasy—the first in a series—in which magic is woven across the history and legacy of slavery and the power dynamics of politics and racism. (Age 13 and older)

The author of the visionary New York Times bestseller Dread Nation returns with another spellbinding historical fantasy set at the crossroads of race and power in America.

It is 1937, and Laura Ann Langston lives in an America divided—between those who work the mystical arts and those who do not. Ever since the Great Rust, a catastrophic event that blighted the arcane force called the Dynamism and threw America into disarray, the country has been rebuilding for a better future. And everyone knows the future is industry and technology—otherwise known as Mechomancy—not the traditional mystical arts.

Laura disagrees. A talented young queer mage from Pennsylvania, Laura hopped a portal to New York City on her seventeenth birthday with hopes of earning her mage’s license and becoming something more than a rootworker.

But four months later, she’s got little to show for it other than an empty pocket and broken dreams. With nowhere else to turn, Laura applies for a job with the Bureau of the Arcane’s Conservation Corps, a branch of the US government dedicated to repairing the Dynamism so that Mechomancy can thrive. There she meets the Skylark, a powerful mage with a mysterious past, who reluctantly takes Laura on as an apprentice.

As they’re sent off on their first mission together into the heart of the country’s oldest and most mysterious Blight, they discover the work of mages not encountered since the darkest period in America’s past, when Black mages were killed for their power—work that could threaten Laura’s and the Skylark’s lives, and everything they’ve worked for.