Exclusive Cover Reveal + Excerpt: Ravenfall by Kalyn Josephson – A MG Fantasy with a Sentient Inn, an Ancient Celtic Creature, and a Spooky Mystery

Friends, we at The Quiet Pond are privileged to share with you all the exclusive cover reveal and excerpt for Ravenfall by Kalyn Josephson, a middle-grade fantasy where the daughter of a psychics and owners of a sentient inn and a runaway must solve a family mystery and stop a terrifying ancient Celtic creature.

Ravenfall will be Kalyn’s middle-grade debut, and I am excited to see what spooky goodness the story will bring. A fantasy mystery with Celtic mythology with one main character’s psychic ability to see death around her and the other’s mysterious past and his search to find his brother, Ravenfall promises a story that will be all at once spooky, mysterious, and exciting. It may be February, but readers looking to put together their lists for spooky season will definitely have to add Ravenfall to their lists.

Here is the book’s summary:

Thirteen-year-old Annabella Ballinkay has never been normal, even by her psychic family’s standards. Every generation uses their abilities to help run the Ravenfall Inn, a sprawling, magical B&B at the crossroads of the human world and the Otherworld. But it’s hard to contribute when your only power is seeing death.
So when fourteen-year-old Colin Pierce arrives at Ravenfall, searching for his missing older brother and the supernatural creature who killed their parents, Anna jumps at the chance to help. But the mysteries tied to Colin go much deeper than either of them expects…
As the two kids team up to find answers, they unearth Colin’s family’s secret past and discover that Colin has powers beyond his imagination. And now the creature who killed his parents, one with eerie origins in Celtic mythology, is coming after him. If Anna and Colin can’t stop the creature by Halloween night, the veil to the Otherworld could be torn open—which would spell destruction for their world as they know it.

Ravenfall releases on the 30th of August, 2022!

Cover Reveal: Ravenfall by Kalyn Josephson

Ravenfall by Kalyn Josephson. Tagline: Strange things always find their way inn. The cover depicts a blonde girl with a cat on her shoulder and a boy, both looking towards a spooky-looking inn with all its lights turned on. Mist and small ghosts swirl around them and the inn.

Artist: Ramona Kaulitzki | Designer: Suzanne Lee

Excerpt: Ravenfall by Kalyn Josephson

Everything looks different in the dark.

By day, Ravenfall’s ballroom is all sparkling stained glass and high, arching ceilings—the perfect place to sit and sketch for hours. By night, my family’s inn becomes a minefield of laughing guests, friendly locals, and what I’m pretty sure is at least one werewolf over by the fruit punch, judging by the bite-sized pieces of raw steak he’s digging into.

The crowd would be fine, if it didn’t make not touching people impossible. Before I turned thirteen and got my psychometry powers—a fancy way of saying Congrats! You get visions of death now—I’d have been weaving through the crowd, chasing down our cat Max before he could prank a guest.

Now I’m hiding in a plant.

You’d think no one would wander over to a dark corner over- hung with singing ivy—currently rustling out a tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and trying to wrap its crimson vines around my ankle—yet I’ve had to dodge a wayward guest three times already.

Granted, Ravenfall’s ballroom is full to bursting. It’s mid-October and the countdown to Samhain and my family’s biggest party of the year is well under way, even if half the people here don’t even know that Samhain is the Celtic origins of Halloween, or that it’s pronounced Sa-Win.

But in the town of Wick, Oregon, where magic is never far from your fingertips, Halloween is the biggest holiday of the year, and Ravenfall is the place to be. Our Samhain party at the end of October is the only time the house lets down its magical wards, letting in everyone from the local witches and mazzikim to the selkies that live in Hollowthorn Woods. Under glamour, of course. We like to give the out-of-towners something to talk about, not run screaming from.

About the Author

Kalyn Josephson is a fantasy author living in the California Bay Area. She loves books, cats, books with cats, and making up other worlds to live in for a while. She is also the author of the Storm Crow duology.

Find Kalyn on: Website | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Goodreads