The Enchanted Cottage of Oceania

Book excerpt: Twelve years after Chester Reynolds’ mysterious disappearance from the Bell Tower at the Enchanted College of Oceania (ECO), his fourteen-year-old identical twin daughters, Harper Leigh and Leigh Harper (named in honor of Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird), embark on a magical quest to determine why he was abducted from their relatively quiet hometown of Oceania, Maryland. Harper and Leigh may be identical, but their personalities could not be more different. Harper excels in sports, and her love of skateboarding is matched only by her feelings for her boyfriend, Jeremy Alexander Fletcher, the good-looking, athletic captain of the Lakeshore Preparatory varsity baseball and football teams. Leigh is light-years ahead of her sophomore class in academics and she prefers to spend Saturday afternoons in ballet class rather than at the skate park with Harper. Harper is a natural dare-devil, but Leigh, the more reserved twin, soon discovers that her chats with a stranger called Poem Man on Teen Village prove to be more sinister and dangerous that she could have ever imagined. Lydia Reynolds, the twins’ mother, owns and operates The Enchanted College of Oceania (ECO), a school for children and young adults with Magical Talents and Special Gifts. ECO is housed in an old mansion with a sordid and murderous history; from ghostly sightings of the mansion’s former owners, J.L and Eloise Winthrop, to strange occurrences in classrooms, students have no shortage of surreal tales to tell. Unlike their hopeful mother, the twins aren’t convinced that their father is still alive. Dr. Xavier Montague, the Headmaster of Lakeshore Preparatory, who has plans of his own for Lydia, often quietly thwarts Lydia’s search for Chester. While visiting ECO one afternoon, Harper discovers a rather ominous magic book that details how to reclaim the dead. The twins soon realize that the book’s spells for resurrection involve “soul-napping”, which proves to be quite difficult as ghosts are hard to capture and control. While the twins attempt to bottle spirits, Lydia becomes the legal guardian of a handsome, sixteen-year-old named Lance Meridian, whose parents recently died in a car accident in Washington D.C. The trauma of the event caused Lance to experience hysterical deafness. Despite his grief and solitude, he establishes a friendship with the four peculiar and rarely seen women of Emerson Pond. In Oceania, no one but Lance is brave enough to even venture into their territory, as few are aware of what occurs in their enchanted cottage. The Reynolds twins must balance the paranormal pursuit to find their father, Chester, (which they title “Project C”) with real world drama at The Academy of the Sacred Names, their all-girls Catholic high school. While executing Project C, the girls must also navigate the precarious corridors of high school marked by rigorous academics, the self-proclaimed “Royals” and their arch-nemesis Meredith Ford. The Reynolds girls certainly never have a dull moment and they manage to find romance, danger and adventure in this world and beyond.