Review: ‘Sun & Moon Academy Book One: Fall Semester’

Sun and Moon Academy Book One

Sun and Moon Academy Book One ReviewThe Havenwood Falls universe is expanding, this time with a whole new type of supernatural creatures: college students.

This semester launches the introduction of Sun & Moon Academy, a College of Supernatural Guardians that acts as an elite training program for a covert army charged with protecting the world’s supernatural community. Students are offered acceptance by invitation only, and after passing a series of gruelling trials to test their worthiness, the top tier are admitted to the hidden college under the mountain. This semester ten students will find themselves “marked” in a series of personalised trials that require them to defeat monsters and mayhem that threaten to destroy campus before time runs out. This is not your typical classroom exercise either. The longer each marked student takes to succeed, the higher the body count grows.

The first collection in the new Sun & Moon Academy spin-off features ten paranormal tales from some of the Collective’s award-winning and bestselling authors, including Kristie Cook, Tish Thawer, Belinda Boring, Rose Garcia, Victoria Flynn, EJ Fechenda, Amy Richie, Victoria Escobar, and Justine Winter. In addition to the collection’s variety of authors, the diversity of supernatural creatures you can expect to find in attendance at SMA runs from vampires to shifters, to angels, and even Valkyries. The students themselves, when they’re not practicing magic, include a host of new faces, familiar family names, and an inclusive student body that takes care to represent the diverse voices of a true university campus. SMA, with its Norse mythology flair and an under-mountain campus that makes Hogwarts Castle look plain by comparison, is truly a home for all furred, fanged, and feathery.

As with any collection, some stories are stronger than others, but all remain true to the unique voice of Havenwood Falls, proving again publisher and Universe-creator Kristie Cook’s unquestionable talent for collaborative world-building and visionary storytelling. Personal favourites in Sun & Moon Academy Book 1 include EJ Fechenda’s “Time to Live”, a story about a time-spinning witch who finds herself torn between the ghost of a boy she visits in a netherworld and her love interest in real time, and Rose Garcia’s “Chasing Time”, wherein Infiniti Clausman (a recent addition to Havenwood Falls High, the universe’s YA fantasy line) finds the power within herself to overcome her challenge.

Whether it’s a supernatural love-triangle you’re interested in or something a little darker, it’s impossible not to fall in love with these characters and their world. As for this reviewer, I’m still holding out for my Hogwarts letter, but if a wooden puzzle box with a star and moon etched on top shows up on my doorstep, I might trade in my wand and head to Havenwood Falls and Sun & Moon Academy instead.

Sun & Moon Academy Book One: Fall Semester is available from Amazon as of October 29th 2019.

Will you be picking up Sun & Moon Academy Book One: Fall Semester? Tell us in the comments below!


Synopsis | Goodreads

Ten paranormal tales and one page-turning supernatural academy story in this spinoff from the award-winning Havenwood Falls universe.

The brand new Sun & Moon Academy College of Supernatural Guardians is an elite training program for a covert army that protects the supernatural community around the world. After a series of grueling trials to test their worthiness, only the top tier of applicants are admitted to the hidden college under the mountain.

We are ten of those students.

We’re a powerful mix of shifters, witches, vampires, demigods, angels, and more, making SMA no ordinary university. Throw in classes about healing potions, inter-dimensional exploration, and combat training, and college life here is a bit . . . well, unusual. But we still must juggle studying, obnoxious roommates, and killer parties. And, of course, we always make room for romance. How can we not? No other place in the world teems with such a sexy fusion of brains and badassery.

But classes haven’t even begun when our campus is terrorized, and the dangers continue throughout the semester—a hacker who threatens to publicly expose our school, a string of vampire attacks, invisible beasts with deadly bites, cursed classrooms that devour those who dare enter . . . What the hell kind of place is this, anyway?

For some reason that not even the Board of Regents has been able to figure out, it’s up to the ten of us to defeat these monsters and mayhem—before the sands in the big courtyard hourglass run out. Yep, we’re being timed, and the bodies are dropping almost as fast as the crystals. If any of us fail, this first semester of SMA just might be the last one ever.

In this unique anthology of over 750 pages, you not only get ten paranormal fantasy novellas, but one sweeping story that will have you flipping pages until the end. Learn more at http://havenwoodfalls.com/.


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