If you haven’t read the first two books, here’s a little backstory: Cyn Rothschild is a normal high school junior who has her world turned upside down when her best friend, Annie, falls under the spell of an evil demon masquerading as the new school librarian, Mr. Gabriel. Cyn, who thought her biggest problems were going to be designing the set for the school musical (Sweeney Todd) and getting Ryan Halsey (who plays the lead) to notice her, suddenly has to save Annie and the entire high school from demons while still tech-directing the musical and handling her very serious crush. Luckily, Cyn discovers she has an unusual kind of demon-resistance that gives her a fighting chance. This special ability also draws the attention of other demons, however, and Cyn ends up making a deal with one of them that requires her to return to the demon world twice more when called upon in the future. Mr. Gabriel turns out to be a hard monster to kill, which is how he’s managed to keep coming back in each book to torment our heroes anew.
I also decided that I wanted to explore new aspects of the character relationships. There are a lot of high emotions in this story, and plenty of tension between different people. And I wanted to give some of the secondary characters—especially Annie—a bit more time to shine. There’s another secondary character, one introduced in book 2, that I loved developing in this third book (and who surprised me a lot!), but I can’t say who it is without giving too much away.
Finally, I wanted to bring the story to a satisfying close while still leaving some open questions about what might happen down the road. I’ve spent years with Cyn and the others now, getting to know them and caring about what happens to them, and it was important to me to leave them in a good place but not a perfect place ... life is rarely neat or easy, and I didn’t want to pretend that it would be in this story. Cyn especially has a lot of complications to figure out. But I feel good about how it all ended, and I hope my readers will too.
The worst thing about trilogies is saying goodbye at the end of the third book. I’ll very much miss spending time with Cyn and Ryan and Peter and all the rest. I felt the same way at the end of The Mage of Trelian—after years of being inside characters’ heads, it’s really hard to let them go! But I like to imagine them living on without me, taking their continuing stories in directions of their own choosing. And in the meantime, I console myself with thoughts of all the new characters I’ll come to know in the next books.
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