Muse: Book 1 in The Artist's Bane Series

by Stephanie Barr

Seventeen-year-old Moira McCrae's world is turned upside-down when her mother mysteriously disappears from their home on the Outer Banks and she suddenly finds herself at the Janus Academy, an elite school for the fine arts, making friends with Lulu, a mysterious and edgy violinist and Sean, a fellow artist with whom she might be falling in love.....The Janus Academy -- and her new friends -- are not all that they seem and Moira must travel to Lunnarossa, a parallel world, to both find her mother and locate a fabled string of pearls that has the power to save -- or destroy -- both worlds.

341 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 21, 2024

About the author

Stephanie Barr is a part time novelist, full time rocket scientist and mother of three children and slave to three cats. She has three blogs, which are sporadically updated. Anything else even vaguely interesting about her can be found in her writing since she puts a little bit of herself in everything she writes . . . just not the same piece.

Reviews

[Rebecca Hardesty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adventure into another world full of new creatures and cryptic prophecies.
Moira is just an average girl who is one day swept away from her mom (who seems to have abandoned her) and taken to a fancy private school. Once there she makes friends with Lulu and learns that there is much more going on than she ever knew.
The world building is very good. I think the descriptions of the forests are my favorite and make me want to be there.