The Convoluted Key is the first book in my brand new middle grade series, Draconian Rules. I’ve had some lovely comments so far, including:
“Skillful storytelling and world building. Sweet and funny.”
and
“I LOVE the humor here and the voice–it reminds me of Rowling in the best way.”
The Convoluted Key is now available as an ebook through Kobo. It will be released in paperback on 8 June.
About The Convoluted Key
Debbie Torken and her brother Danny have heard rumours of the world where Magicians dwell. But when Danny is accidentally handed a Key that unlocks the realm of Magicas they are pitched into an adventure they never could have expected.
Tween witch Pippa Dracona prefers mathematics to magic, so the chance to attend a school in Physicas, the realm of science, was supposed to be a dream come true. But the Dame Ivy Newton School for Gifted and Unusual Students has too many archaic and nonsensical rules. Pippa is about to fail her favourite subject and lose her place in the course. When she makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to let the Torken children into the realm of magic, she might have made her worst choice yet … or, perhaps, her best.
If Pippa is to keep an important promise, she must find a way to get the Torkens home before the next witching hour begins. It’s time to enlist the help of some eccentric friends, solve a bizarre mystery involving unicorns and missing belongings, and gain some much-needed perspective. After all, there are two sides to every equation.
Weaving through The Convoluted Key are a number of feminist-friendly themes, such as a wide variety of female characters with different personalities and motivations, supportive female friendship, and thoughtful male characters who are respectful towards female characters.
Elle Carter Neal is the author of the middle-grade chapter book The Convoluted Key, picture book I Own All the Blue, and teen science-fantasy novel Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin. She has been telling stories for as long as she can remember, holding childhood slumber-party audiences entranced until the early hours of the morning. Elle decided to be an author the day she discovered that real people wrote books and that writing books was a real job.
The fascinating thing about The Islands of Chaldea is not that it is Diana Wynne Jones’s last book but that she died with it unfinished and it was completed and published posthumously. DWJ’s younger sister Ursula has given fans an extraordinary gift by seamlessly integrating an ending to the unfinished manuscript. We will never know if it is the ending Diana would’ve written – because she left no clues, no notes, and an entire committee of family and friends brainstorming for hours could not figure out what she might have intended for the story. Nevertheless, Ursula’s ending is fitting and satisfying and a wonderful tribute to Diana’s memory and the power of sisterhood. 
