Behind the Shattered Twin

cover for The Shattered Twin

My latest book, the Shattered TWin – book one of the newly-minted Crescent Academy series – takes a lot of inspiration from the Harry Potter series. All my kids love the Potter series, and read and re-read it several times, so it’s no surprise that I would think them interested in something inspired, but more … me.

What started out as “what if Harry Potter but with XYZ ideas from video games” ended up being the Crescent Academy series. The series world includes:

  • A strong, multi-cultural, Muslim-majority school based in the mountains of Morocco
  • Five school houses, each strongly tied to one particular aspect of magic, such as forging magical artifacts, the Shadow Realm, and more
  • An ancient evil with a dark past tied to our protagonist
  • A strong monotheistic theology linked to the origin of magic
  • Dragon riders
  • Talking cats
  • Magical ninjas

This book also took me the longest time to write – nearly three months, starting before Ramadan continuing after – and the most amount of editing. If the points above didn’t give it away, the primary audience is children aged 9-12. I tried hard to include a strong plot, a scary (but not monster-scary) final villan, and a vocabulary that will allow the majority of kids to grasp and understand immediately.

But, since my own nine year-old son reads voraciously, and since he helped both steer and edit the book, it may still (after weeks of revising and re-revising!) contain a few words other nine year-olds won’t understand. But that’s all part of the fun of reading Fantasy books, in my opinion.

The book clocks in at 68k words, and 300 pages – a full novel length, and has a correspondingly high printing cost. Although I price my books very close to cost price, the price is a hefty $23 (CAD).

I planned an entire series of several books that complete the plot, anywhere from five to nine, with the next one somewhat firmly planned out. Each book is a self-contained “episode” that also advances the overall plot.

And yes, talking cats.

If that sounds interesting, give the book a look. You can read more about the book here.

P.S. full disclosure, the magical ninjas and dragon riders appear only briefly in book one!