White Tyger Book

This is a truly magical tale, full of strangeness, terrors and wonders. Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world, where she was adopted and raised in a quiet Massachusetts college town.

The narrative is split between our world and the people in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda — with her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda — is brought back to her home reality. Each of them is changed in the process and all will have much to learn about their true identities and the strange world they find themselves in.

This story is a triumph of contemporary fantasy.

Publishers Weekly

Park's fascinating, sharply written third novel set in an alternate-reality German-occupied "Roumania" (after 2006's The Tourmaline) finds 15-year-old Miranda Popescu in danger of being used as a pawn in a complicated political game. Once a girl from Berkshire County, Mass., before her mysterious displacement to this strange land where alchemy really works, she tries to hold onto the person she was while developing her new potential, especially by exploring the shadowy secret world of animal souls that underlies daily reality. With the help of her friends Chevalier de Graz (previously Peter Gross in the Berkshires) and the shape-shifting Lieutenant Prochenko (once a girl known as Andromeda), she resists her chief antagonist, the memorable, cunning Baroness Ceausescu. Though Park makes few concessions for new readers to this series, the surprising and convincing character-driven action will seize the imagination of fans and newcomers alike. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.