Black Raindrop

The Veil is tearing over Kaytoe. Sixteen-year-old Lance Bridges just came home to hold it shut.

Kaytoe is a working-class city in the Zato States, where the Veil between the living world and the spirit world fails in places - and where the county files every gifted child it can name. Lance came home carrying two things no file explains: an eye that reads a person's intent and the power carrying it, and a voice in his head that is patient, amused, and starving.

His mother died in the war the adults filed away. His father is raising the family at 8374 Florence Drive. His grandmother says a recipe out loud or it doesn't count. And on his first night defending the city's ward grid, soldiers come through an unpicked seam to take the base - and to open a school where war-year children will be taught to be quiet and useful.

Lance has never been given command. He takes it anyway. He holds the seam with his bare hand, and when something ancient offers him help at a price, his answer is the one the whole war will be fought over: "Not today. Not ever for free."

BLACK RAINDROP: SEASON ONE is the opening volume of the Taka Demon Saga - a completed fourteen-book family epic in which ordinary life is not the break from the war. It is the thing being defended. Every episode carries that texture, down to the recipes, because in Kaytoe dinner is a position you hold.

For readers of Fonda Lee's Jade City and N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became.

Rated R: strong language, fantasy violence, intense thematic material. Adult fantasy.