The Goblin Crown

"[T]horoughly entertaining and utterly delightful." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review, for The Meister of Decimen City

"[A] blast and inventive as all get out . . ." --Booklist, Starred Review, for The Meister of Decimen City

Who are you when you can wear any face?

Aren is a shapeshifter, able to run with a centaur herd, fly on a hawk's wings, and scurry through the kitchens to the screams of the innkeeper's wife.

At age six, she was a human foundling left at the edge of the woods to be raised by the local hedgewitch. When knights arrived from the capital to investigate a strange upheaval in the northern country, they sought out the witch's help, hoping to stave off a foretold disaster that they were helpless to stop in the end.

Now, at nineteen, he's living in disguise as an elf in the Queen's Court, flirting with nobles to find out what killed his mother and cursed their village. With eyes in the court looking out for an infiltrator after a palace guard caught Aren shapeshifting, and a royal human delegation visiting that are all too familiar with him, he must walk a careful line to avoid being found as he pieces together the truth of what happened all those years ago--and how it may be tied to a similar disaster that happened three hundred years prior in the elfland.

For readers who enjoy Witch King by Martha Wells, Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare, and Uprooted by Naomi Novik.

Brenna Raney is the author of The Meister of Decimen City, 2023 Foreword INDIES Gold Medal winner for Humor and shortlist title for the 2024 ALA Reading List. Her first books were written on hand-stapled printer paper. Her early work was later entrusted to gel pens and floppy disks, then ballpoint and flash drives, and briefly, receipt paper from her first job. In her Academic Period, she produced dry and esoteric works for which she was awarded a master's degree. She resides in Texas, where she teaches for a living and bakes for fun.