Roaming Heart: The Prequel

Meleedrid Darcangelo performs as the Gypsy Princess — a name Earth gave her family, which her father wears the way he wears everything: loose, and on purpose. Flying horse trainer. Show-world royalty. Daughter of a man who never loses.

But the show worlds are not Earth, flying horses are not safe, and her family's true name is the one thing they have never put on a poster.

Revere Beach, Massachusetts, 1926. Melee is eighteen, a year into America, and contracted to run a diving horse show for a man named Shurley who owns everything on this stretch of coastline. Her parents should have been back by now. They're not. The only one who knows where they went is Alpine Queen, matriarch of the flying bloodline — and Alpine Queen is in labor.

What follows is one extraordinary summer: a mare who gives hard advice, a foal born in secret with wings too new to fly, a two-headed carnival man whose second voice knows more than he admits, a racetrack horse with a sideline in financial strategy, three jobs on one boardwalk, a gun on a pier, and a carnival at Faneuil Hall that — for the first time all summer — feels like home.

Roaming Heart: The Prequel is a complete, standalone entry point to Melee's world. For readers of historical fantasy and coming-of-age fiction, and for anyone who has ever wanted a flying horse to tell them exactly what to do.

"They called us angels in one country and devils in the next one over… None of those were our name."

Historical fantasy. Standalone prequel to Roaming Heart (novel forthcoming).