“Sarah!”

Sarah sighed as she snapped out of her imaginary world. She was still in Doctor Goldberg’s office, and only five minutes had passed. She sat up straight in an overstuffed chair and ran her hands across the legs of her blue jeans.

“What is it, Doctor Goldberg?” She batted her eyes innocently as she spoke.

“You weren’t listening to me at all, were you?”

“Of course I was.”

“Then what did I say?”

“Um…that I have problems telling the difference between fantasy and reality?”

Doctor Goldberg’s gray mustache twitched in irritation. “That was a lucky guess.”

The story of Greystone Valley is really the story of Sarah, a twelve year old girl who finds herself trapped in a fantasy realm. In some ways, it’s the ideal situation for Sarah, who has become obsessed with fairy tales and stories about magic. On the other hand, none of the heroes Sarah has read about have ever had to fight armies and hide from cave trolls while in her pajamas.

Sarah is twelve years old and just starting high school. An only child, she’s lived a normal life for the most part. However, this past summer has been a bad one, as she lost her father in an accident. Since then, she has been slipping deeper and deeper into a depression, avoiding her friends and retreating into stories she used to read as a child. Her mom, previously happy that her daughter was such a good reader, has become more concerned that Sarah is beginning to see her fantasy stories as more real than her actual life.

Sarah now lives with her mom in a house that seems far too large for only two people. She has started to avoid her old friends and only leaves the house to go to school or when her mom drags her out on errands. Her mom has arranged for her to meet weekly with a psychiatrist named Doctor Goldberg, but this has proven counterproductive, since Sarah is smart enough to spend the sessions playing head games with him instead of actually working to solve her problems.

In the midst of this depression, Sarah wakes up one morning to find herself not only in somebody else’s home but in another world entirely. Met immediately by the renegade wizard Kay and forced into hiding from the army of Baelan the warlord, she doesn’t have much time to collect her wits or even find a change of clothes.

Greystone Valley is not entirely unfamiliar to Sarah, though. Not only does she recognize many of the creatures of the valley from her fantasy stories, but she has a very unique ability that makes her a potential heroine. Unlike everybody else in the valley, she can read the spellbook that once belonged to Kay’s father, which contains every piece of magical lore in the known world. Among the secrets in this tome is the key to opening up Castle Greystone and using it to reach other worlds – a piece of information that the warlord Baelan will stop at nothing to discover.

What is Sarah’s connection to Greystone Valley? How can she read a spellbook written in a language she has never seen before? Will she ever find a suitable change of clothes? Check out Greystone Valley for answers to these questions and more.

Image by Jessica von Braun