I've recently taken on this fabulous author who came via an editor I have a huge amount of respect for and share a similar taste in books. She described the author's book as the Kingkiller Chronicles meets Harry Potter. You can't help be intrigued at a pitch like that!!

Elena Russler Reed is based in the US and has written an intricately imaginative YA/crossover fantasy called The Ivory Tower set in a world, not unlike our own but where magic exists and is shunned and feared. With characters that just jump off the page and a richly-imagined world, this read like Samantha Shannon meets Trudi Canavan with all the magical storytelling abilities of Naomi Novik. It's a wonderful coming-of-age tale of friendship, love and finding your place in the world.

THE IVORY TOWER

Nell Greenwood has never performed even the barest breath of magic. But that won’t matter if the Red Guards ever find out how hard she has been trying. It has been eight years since her mother was burned at the stake, and the Guards have been watching her ever since, waiting for her to reveal herself as a witch as well. Nell dreams of someday traveling north to seek out the legendary Sorcerers’ City, where she hopes to learn magic and find a home among her mother’s kin.

When she acquires a rare medieval grimoire, Nell thinks she may have found the information she needs to begin her quest. But her plans go awry when she falls ill with a deadly fever. Left for dead by her employers, she is taken in by the charitable physician Doctor Kiergan. The doctor’s enchanting ward, Sariele, shares Nell’s fascination with the Sorcerers’ City but she is keeping secrets of her own. What does she know about magic that she isn’t telling Nell? What really happened to her absent father? And who are the strangers that come and go in the night? 

As Nell delves deeper into the mysteries of forbidden sorcery, she learns that the Sorcerers’ City may not be the paradise she imagined. Should she trust Sariele, and put her fate in the hands of powerful strangers who will use her to further their own ambitions? Or should she give up her dream of learning magic entirely, and forge her own path in a hostile land? And how can she escape her traumatic past, when this new world seems immutably intertwined with her old?

E.V. Reed was born and raised in New York City and studied history and English at Princeton University and the University of St. Andrews. She currently resides in the New York suburbs with several highly opinionated yet endearing individuals, including a husband, a toddler and two cats.

She loves gargoyles, cobblestones, castles and other historical architecture, being near the sea, words and names and the history behind them, trees and greenery, old maps, fluffy creatures with sharp claws, brightly colored or shiny objects, and the limitless potential for discovery in libraries and bookstores. She has wanted to be a writer for as long as she can remember.

I'm just finishing off the edits on this and then will be looking to submit to  publishers. I think they're going to love this!!