Manuscripts


If living in the slums of Paris during the Terror has taught seventeen-year-old Rose Estienne one thing, it’s how to keep her neck out from beneath the guillotine’s blade: never talk to strangers. Especially if those strangers are aristocrats, clergymen, or werewolves. Rose is well aware that werewolves are nothing but gypsy scum, magical aberrations that don’t align with the laws of reason, monsters that are sure to get her killed if they don’t finish the job themselves. 

At least, she is well aware of it until she catches a werewolf trying to steal her mother’s washing. 

When Rose comes face-to-face with Avar, she does not see a monster: she sees a boy not unlike herself, starving and alone and afraid. And when one of the city’s militant poor tries to kill Avar, she cannot help but stop the attack – an action that casts her as a traitor just like him. 

Rose and Avar escape, but her family is arrested and thrown into prison, guilty by association.  She has neither money nor political connections; her only option is to break her family out before they pay for her decision with their lives. Rose turns to the one person she can trust not to betray her to the police: Avar. He’s reluctant to help – he has spent his whole life running away, and as they tackle the defenses of the Conciergerie prison, his courage falters. But Rose, who always spills coffee and tears clothes, is the only thing standing between her family and the guillotine, and she is determined that this time, she will do something right.

A TERROR OF DARKNESS is a YA historical fantasy complete at 67,000 words. 

Other projects include:

Letters to Oliver, a completed YA historical fantasy in epistolary format, sees Emily taken from her school of magic to have her season in London, and her letters, both sent and unsent, soon involve a nefarious suitor, a chase across London, and one very particular white rabbit.

And two works-in-progress:

Up in Smoke is a YA historical (with no fantasy elements) set in London during the Blitz. Sixteen-year-old Sophie Miller agrees to hide a young soldier who's run away from hospital in the hopes that she can reach through his shell-shock and find out what happened to her missing-in-action father.

The Long Road Home is a YA historical fantasy and Caitlin's senior project at Ithaca College. The Great Famine has taken near everything from Maire Finn, and when a mysterious stranger offers her the chance at survival, she jumps at it - even though it means abandoning her family.