Background
Ann Downer was born in Arlington, Virginia in 1960 and grew up in Manila and Bangkok and recalled avidly reading fantasy fiction.
(Ever since she was caught up in a magical whirlwind of dr...)
Ever since she was caught up in a magical whirlwind of dragons, spells, and wizards, Theodora Oglethorpe has been doing her best to put the Events of Last Summer behind her and go back to her life as a normal twelve-year-old girl. But no matter how hard she tries to forget about magic, it always seems to find her - even when she's on vacation! When Theodora's biologist-dad is called to the Scottish island of Scornsay to study a scale believed to be from a previously unknown species, Theodora is thrilled to be invited along. A nice vacation is just what she needs to forget all about wyverns, demons, and magical tunnels through time. But as soon as Theodora sees the scale, she knows it's not from a fish, a reptile, or anything known to science. It's from a dragon, and as Theodora knows all too well, wherever there are dragons, there are wizards, and then there's sure to be trouble. Before she can solve the mystery of the dragon's scale, Theodora will have to confront her own magical heritage and make a perilous journey to the wizard's limbo known as Never-Was. The Dragon of Never-Was, the sequel to Hatching Magic, is just as funny, witty, and richly imagined as its predecessor. Filled with eccentric characters, crafty dragons, dazzling spells, good friends, and a feisty heroine that readers will root for, this is a middle-grade fantasy to be savored.
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Ann Downer was born in Arlington, Virginia in 1960 and grew up in Manila and Bangkok and recalled avidly reading fantasy fiction.
Smith College.
Her first published work was a trilogy published in the late 1980s and early 1990s (The Spellkey, The Glass Salamander, and The Books of the Keepers), collected in a revised edition in 1995 as The Spellkey Trilogy. A second series for middle-grade readers, begun in 2003 with the novel Hatching Magic, continues with. The Spellkey series is high fantasy, taking place wholly in an invented world and chronicling a good-versus-evil story of two foundlings, a stableboy and an ostracized secretary.
Hatching Magic and its sequel, The Dragon of Never-Was, are contemporary fantasies with elements of time traveling
The series follows a young girl, Theodora Oglethorpe, as she discovers a world of wizardry and magic. While Downer’s books are frequently compared to the work of Patricia A. McKillip and Diana Wynne Jones, she has cited the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books and the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander in shaping her outlook and prose style.
She was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 2014 and died on November 19, 2015 in Boston, Master of Arts.
(Ever since she was caught up in a magical whirlwind of dr...)
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