A teenage girl is transported to a dangerous realm and must learn to trust others if she and her friends have any chance of survival. The protagonist Amber is a thirteen-year-old girl just trying to keep up her grades and survive the daily Shadow Hour that has taken over her world. Amber has lived with her aunt since the strange disappearance of her parents and the loss of her memories. Left alone with her aunt, trying to move on from the mystery of her parents' disappearance, and wary of the threat that the Shadow Hour poses to her and everyone around her, Amber becomes fiercely independent and motivated though reluctant to reach out to others or accept help. Only when Amber is swept into another dimension and forced to work with an unlikely group of friends does she begin to open up and realize that she doesn't need to face the world alone. In this Hunger Games-like fantasy adventure novel, Amber is banished from the dangerous near future of her own reality to another realm known as the Shadow Realm. There she must survive a series of deadly obstacles in order to save not only herself and her friends, but humanity as well. Anya Costello is a teen author whose manuscript won first prize of the International Writing Contest of Stone Soup magazine and Mackenzie Press. Anya says: I have been writing stories since the age of four and at age ten, I attempted my first full length work of fiction, The Shadow Hour. I have always been drawn to writing fantasy and fiction. Building worlds that follow different rules from our own, like the Shadow Realm, and creating the characters that live within them allows me to put aspects of my own life, experiences, and thoughts in an entirely new context. Anya has been presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair and has received a citation from United Sates Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III. Anya was born and raised in Massachusetts where she currently resides with her family.
