The Astral Library

Prologue

Have you ever wanted to live inside a book?

I saw that written on a library wall once, in curly purple script over the doors to the children’s section.

Complete with a mural of an annoyingly adorable little girl crawling between the covers of an oversize book, pulling the pages up like clean sheets over her annoyingly adorable ringlets.

She looked so smug, I wanted to slam the book on her head .

. . but the curly scripted question lingered.

Have you ever wanted to live inside a book?

I began seriously contemplating this particular life choice eighteen years ago, on the day eight-year-old me was ushered through the front door of my third foster home in six months.

I peered through my ragged bangs as I stood clutching a plastic trash bag full of all my clothes and a battered paperback copy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and my new foster mother barely shifted her attention from her iPhone, on which she was thumb-tapping away at some candy-colored game.

Better than my last one, who’d been so hungover when I arrived that she could barely grunt a greeting when the social worker ushered me through the door.

“You’ll sleep in the back with the other kids,” the new one grunted, not looking up.

“Dinner’s over, but there’s Cheerios if you’re hungry. ”

I lugged my trash bag to the back room, curled up on the cot in the corner, which was clearly meant for me, and inhaled stale cigarette smoke and even staler microwave popcorn as I peeled open my book.

A book where a girl not much older than me was falling into another world, a world filled with dragon-crested ships and warrior kings and sapphire-blue seas dotted with golden islands like gems.

Have you ever wanted to live inside a book?

For God’s sake.

Why would someone like me ever want to live anywhere else?