Breeana Puttroff

The Dusk Gate Chronicles ran to eight novels between 2011 and 2018, with novellas and short pieces filling the gaps between them. Seeds of Discovery opens the sequence: Quinn Robbins, a Colorado high school student, follows a withdrawn classmate named William Rose across a broken bridge and lands in Eirentheos, a kingdom of stone roads and horses where the boy proves to be a prince and time runs at a different rate from home. Roots of Insight, published the following year, takes her back into that world and its politics. A Christmas Rose is numbered 4.5 in the series, a short seasonal piece written to sit after the first four novels rather than to carry the plot forward. Puttroff taught school in Colorado before the books took over, and by her own account holds an English degree from Northern Colorado and a master's in curriculum, instruction and literacy from Lesley University in Massachusetts. She later started a separate sequence, Gatekeepers, with Traveler.