By Sarah Mlynowski, Lauren Myracle, Emily Jenkins
A girl whose magic for turning into animals keeps misfiring gets sent to the class for children whose magic comes out sideways, where she starts to see her wonky version as a strength.
Nory Horace is a Fluxer, which in her world should mean she can turn herself into one clean animal at a time. Instead she comes out a dritten: half dragon, half kitten, breathing fire and coughing up hairballs. She flunks the entrance exam to Sage Academy, where her own father is the headmaster, and gets shipped off to live with an aunt she barely knows so she can attend the Upside-Down Magic class at Dunwiddle Magic School. Her new classmates are just as sideways. Elliott is a Flare whose fire comes out as ice. Andres is a Flyer who floats up to the ceiling and has to be kept on a tether. Bax turns into a rock when he's under pressure. Their teacher, Ms. Starr, keeps telling them none of them is broken. The children in the ordinary classes disagree, loudly.
You know the child who's wary of quests and monsters, or who tried one and put it down after a chapter? This one might land, because nothing hunts anybody in it. The whole book happens at school, and the magic problems are the plot: how do you get your fire to stop coming out cold, how do you keep from floating off during lunch. That makes the fantasy easy to walk into, because the world runs on rules your child already knows by heart — a bell, a teacher, a table of mean faces across the room. Under the jokes, it's really about being the child who does things differently, and Nory's wonkiness may land close to home for anyone who's been told they're doing school wrong.