Serafina and the Black Cloak-The Serafina Series Book 1

As a fiction editor, I find it difficult to turn off my inner editor when I’m reading for my own pleasure, so I tend to be more critical (I call it discerning) than many other readers. I’ll often put a book down after a few pages or chapters because of various “flaws” that have jolted me out of the story. This means I rarely get to experience the joy I used to of losing myself in a wonderful tale. So I’m always thrilled and grateful when I find a rare book that will draw me in and continue to enthrall me till the end. Serafina and the Black Cloak definitely hooked me from the start and kept me eagerly turning the pages every night, then during my lunch breaks. I received this book in the mail as an ARC for review, and when I first took it out of the wrapping, I loved the cover, and reading the back cover copy immediately piqued my interest, so I couldn’t wait to check it out. I was intrigued from the very first sentence, which set the tone for the rest of the novel: “Serafina opened her eyes and scanned the darkened workshop, looking for any rats stupid enough to come into her territory while she slept.” I was definitely hooked and eagerly looked forward to my nightly escape into Serafina’s fascinating world, cheering her on, wondering where she came from, why she was different, and how she got her special powers. And it wasn’t long before I started worrying about her, as well as her pa and her friend Braedon – not to mention the innocent children who were disappearing nightly! I absolutely loved Serafina, with her spunk and courage, and all her unanswered questions about who she is and how she ended up living her clandestine life in the basement of a huge mansion in North Carolina at the end of the nineteenth century. Hiding by day, Serafina prowls by night to help rid the mansion of its rats and also to explore the rest of the mansion and its grounds. Hers is a lonely life, with just her and her pa, until she meets Braedon Vanderbilt. Both in need of a friend, they join forces to find and defeat the Man in the Black Cloak, who is abducting children. With his skillful depiction of the various details of the mansion and the people living and visiting there, not to mention the surrounding forest and all its creatures, the talented author, Robert Beatty, succeeded in vividly bringing this story world and its fascinating characters to life for me. I continued to be entranced by Serafina and her life after I closed the book each night. As a former middle-grade English teacher and school librarian, I highly recommend this book to anyone aged about ten and up. I know I’d be raving about it to my students, and would purchase several copies for the library.

I am privileged to have received an advanced reader copy of a captivating new book entitled Serafina and the Twisted Staff, which was written by author Robert Beatty. This fast paced mystery book is the second one in a series about a young girl whose existence has been kept a secret by her pa who lives in the basement of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. By creating his story as historical fiction, the author places the reader into the elegant 1899 lifestyle of the Vanderbilts who live at their elaborately decorated Biltmore mansion. He skillfully weaves local history into a suspenseful tale that shocks, as well as excites both the middle school students it is recommended for and all of the adults who can't get enough of this delightful story! The richness of the language used by Mr. Beatty is impressive and often borders on poetic. The author's vivid descriptions added to the excellent and respectful use of regional dialect allows readers to easily sense and visualize exactly what happens as Serafina and her friend Braeden Vanderbilt sneak around to investigate mysterious houseguests and search for clues about the dangerous things that have been taking place. This unlikely friendship grows as the two explore Biltmore and the surrounding forests and battle powerful evil threats as they solve the spooky, rather complex mystery. In the first book, Serafina and the Black Cloak, Serafina aches to understand why her pa had been hiding her for the first 12 years of her life. Throughout the second book, Serafina and the Twisted Staff, this young protagonist is pulled toward her destiny as she continues to grapple with loyalty decisions and finds even more surprising discoveries about her own origins. Though Serafina is exhausted from dealing with the Man in the Black Cloak in the first book, she is immediately drawn into a new and very serious threat that involves both the Biltmore Estate and the people and animals she is trying to protect there. The depth of the language, multiple understories, and wisdom woven into the complex plot make this an exciting read! As a 5th grade teacher in departmentalized English classrooms, I recently used both books as high interest mentor texts to help my students prepare for Virginia’s high stakes tests. The text of both books offered many possibilities for correlation to the Virginia standards and the local pacing guides for teachers. My students absolutely loved that I read the Serafina books orally as we reviewed story structure, characterization, figurative language, genre, point of view, and use of context clues! As the heroine of the series, Serafina is strong and courageous. She offers appealing characteristics and is a good role model of perseverance, friendship, and loyalty. Thank you, Mr. Beatty, for writing pure enjoyment for your readers! [...] https://www.amazon.com/Serafina-Twisted-Staff-Novel/dp/1484775031?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1484775031&linkCode=as2&linkId=KVZGI53YPOD7EMQQ&redirect=true&ref_=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl&tag=robertbeattyc-20 Linda Woodward Jonesville, Virginia

Biltmore Estate, Asheville, NC. 1899. Serafina, age 12, is the daughter of a maintenance man employed at the Biltmore Estate. Unknown to the Vanderbilts, Serafina have been secretly living in the basement of the estate for some time. Serafina often struggles with sleeping through the night, so she tends to take walks around the house and grounds while her father sleeps. It is on one of these nightly walks that she sees another young girl being dragged into the basement area by a mysterious man in a long black cloak. Right before her very eyes, Serafina watches this girl just vanish into thin air, mid-cry. Over the following days, more children of Biltmore's guests likewise vanish. Serafina herself knows what's going on, having escaped the clutches of the man herself (though she was never able to get a clear look at his face -- judging from what she did see, she's not even sure if he's entirely human), but she feels no one would accept the truth as she would have to explain it, so she sets out to try to catch the man herself. Teaming up with new friend Braeden, George Vanderbilt's (then owner of Biltmore Estate) nephew, she tries to bait the cloaked man into revealing himself. The plan she comes up with includes going into the very woods that her father has always asked her to avoid... because those woods hold a secret to her lineage she may not be ready to discover. Given that I live just down the road from Biltmore Estate, how could I not give this one a go?! I'll say that it caught me off guard a bit. For a book put out by Disney, geared towards middle-grade readers, this story got waaaay darker than I was expecting! Adult readers will likely be pretty entertained by the mild creepy factor (by adult standards, that is) but yeah, when you picture younger kids reading this, it's hard not to pause every so often and think "Dang, really?!" I'm sure it will be fine for older middle-graders and teen readers, but I would say to parents if you have a bookworm much younger than 8, you might want to give this a read-through before letting them have at it. I could see this being just a wee bit nightmare-inducing for the really young ones. That being said, it's a pretty fun little adventure for fans of mild to moderate spookiness. There's the mysterious cloaked figure (and can I just say I could not get "Man In The Long Black Coat" -- the Joan Osborne version -- out of my head the whole time I was reading this!), scenes in an abandoned graveyard, hair-raising shadows and paranormal connections. The beginning of the story reminded me a bit of the opening scenes of the movie Hocus Pocus, but later it turned more Legend of Sleepy Hollow-ish. I was actually surprised to see absolutely no mention of Biltmore's Halloween Room. It's one of the most famous rooms in the entire estate and would have fit in perfectly with this story! In fact, from a book design perspective, I was thinking it would have been so perfect to incorporate some of the artwork from that room onto the endpages but nope, sadly the reader just gets a solid hunter green inside. Still pretty, but a missed opportunity to be sure. {Reading up on the history of the house, I learned that the artwork in that room only dates back to the 1920s, so historically it would have been inaccurate with the timeline of the book, but I STILL say it would have made for cool endpapers!} I was hoping for a bit more of the actual estate life worked into the story. What was there was kinda neat but also a lot of meh. Maybe I'm spoiled, having been to the actual place myself. There's a sense of grandeur -- which induces daydreams of imagining the sounds of carriage wheels, faint tinklings of a piano, southern winds through the breezeways -- that you instantly get walking on those grounds that I just didn't get with this story. But I will say, it was pretty touching to read such a young character SO willing to always put herself before others, even risking death at one point! Serafina has a real sense of what is right and wrong, finding herself frustrated with the discovery that not everyone in the world shares this gift. She can't comprehend why or how people can go through life deliberately carrying out evil but she doesn't fear doing what needs to be done to set things to rights. I just loved that about her. She also just has a great way of interpreting life in general: "She thought it was interesting how just about everyone had a special talent or skill, something they were naturally drawn to and good at, and then they worked years to master it. Nobody knew how to do everything. It wasn't possible. There wasn't enough time in the night. But everyone knew something. And everyone was a little different. Some people did one thing. Others did another. It made her think that maybe God intended for them to all fit together, like a puzzle made whole." Serafina's friendship with Braeden also tugs at a reader's heartstrings when she discovers that he's struggled for his place in the world just as much as she has, even though he seemingly has all the riches of the world at his feet. Through their talks they discover that before meeting each other, they both desperately craved companionship, having that one friend in the world who just gets you without even trying, that one kindred spirit who doesn't think you're too strange or creepy at all, it's just obvious to them that no one took the time to properly get to know you before. I think that theme of wanting to know where you come from and be with people who love and understand you unconditionally resonated with me more than anything.

I bought this book for my young son. I try to read all the books that I buy for him, and in this one, I discovered a magical tale that drew me in immediately. Seen through the eyes of and told by the young protagonist, the author has done a masterful job of allowing one to share the feeling of being young, surrounded by a story of a child coming of age, discovering their true identity, of finding friends and a place in a suddenly much larger and grander world, of discovering a duty to protect others and the courage required to do so, and becoming a hero wrapped in a small but determined package in the process. Several wonderful themes emerge along the way for children readers: that a job done well, however mean, gives one a chance to achieve pride in oneself and satisfaction of knowing that it also may benefit others, 2) that one's true parents are those who love and care for us as children, not only those who we share genes with, 3) that being different is not bad at all, and one's difference can actually be one's true strength and gifts to the world, 4) that true character and goodness are not defined so much by victory or defeat against a challenge as it is by our courage to rise to meet it, no matter how daunting it may seem. This book is filled with themes and values that I want my child to be filled with, but they are shared in a most delightfully charming way, through the eyes and words of a child, learning these and many other values for herself, as a truly delightful and magical story unfolds in a way which feels like being read to by a parent or librarian, with warmth, the occasional gasp, a sense of knuckle-tightening trepidation, and a soul-warming and deeply satisfying resolution. I intend to read it again right away,with and to my own child, to share it together with love, warmth, and intimacy the like that shared in between the characters in the book. And I'll privately enjoy knowing that I'm also secretively sharing a few lessons of American history, folklore, and social ethics and moral values so subtly that my child will likely not ever even realize that education is even one of my motives for sharing the book with him. I am a most ardent fan of this author and book. It should be considered a must-read to be shared between parents and children of all families, whether they share genetic heritage or not... perhaps especially appropriate for non-traditional or single-parent families where love is the primary motivation which binds one to another, not a wedding vow or ring. I just can't adequately express how thankful I am to have found this book to be able to share with my child, but I've tried and I hope many other parents also find it and share it with theirs, as well. And if you are a young person reading this review, ignore everything I just typed about a parent liking it so much as a teaching tool. I promise you'll never notice it other than it being a cracking- good story with moral courage and daring-do facing against true evil and daunting strength, with love and loyalty to friends being what matters most, in the end.

Let's face it, most novels written for the YA market are fluff, designed to entice young readers to engage with the process of novel reading. When they engage reader's adolescent emotions, they do well with their YA readers, and with the adults who are charged with selecting books to add to the young-readers' section of the local library or bookstore. But some novels labeled as YA are more substantial than that. While still engaging for the young reader, they possess a deeper message, and present ideas that can engage a reader of any age. By doing so, this author partakes of a legacy that comes from an older time, before the YA niche market was designated, when adults read the same novels their children would read. For example, C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" novels, the "Wrinkle In Time" books by Madeleine L'Engel, any of Mark Twain's Mississippi novels or anything by Roald Dahl—this is a very short list of novels which give the young reader more than emotional candy to tempt them to read. You can add Robert Beatty's "Serafina and the Black Cloak" to the list. 12-year-old Serafina is one of the most intriguing characters I have run across recently in my reading, whether YA novels or general literature. She is the "Chief Rat Catcher" at Biltmore, the Gilded Age Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina. Her job—in fact, her very presence—is unknown to the 1899 Vanderbilt family. She and her train-mechanic father live in hiding in the basement of the sprawling maze-like building George Vanderbilt had recently built in the middle of the woods, and Serafina knows more about the nooks, rat-runs, secret passages, and hidey-holes in the building than anyone else who lives there. To help her catch and release rats, Serafina has some advantages. She is slender, with an ability to squeeze her body through any opening she can get her head through. She has only four digits on each hand and foot, but they end in strong fingernails, useful for holding onto the squirming rodents when she catches them. Her large golden eyes see very well in the dark. Any tiny sliver of light is sufficient for her to do her work. When the girl observes a child from "upstairs," a guest of the Vanderbilts, vanishing after being enveloped by the crackling black cloak of a tall man wearing dress shoes, Serafina is faced with a dilemma. Her father does not believe her tale. Should she approach someone upstairs and report her experience? If she does, she risks exposing her father's and her presence in the Biltmore basement. But if she does not, who will stop the child-snatcher in the black cloak? Serafina must answer this challenge, moving beyond her childhood reliance on her Pa for direction to make this decision. She must also face her own night-creature nature, and learn to move in the world above-stairs as nimbly as she has in the rat-runs. "Did evil creatures think of themselves as evil? Or did they think they were doing what was right?" Despite the many vampire and shape-shifter allusions, this is not a "hidden world" story. Serafina's choice of battles proves that she and the people she deals with are all too human: "OUR CHARACTER ISN’T DEFINED BY THE BATTLES WE WIN OR LOSE, BUT BY THE BATTLES WE DARE TO FIGHT." It is that which gives the story its winning appeal.

Serafina and the Black Cloaks cover is what enticed me to want to read the novel in the first place, the blurb made me want the novel more so, and eventually led to me getting the book. And I’m glad that I did. It’s one of those novels that you can’t help but continuously read no matter what you may need to be doing. And it’s that way because every turn of the page holds a new adventure for Serafina. And it leaves you guessing until the very last page what is really going on, none of it is predictable. The novel starts of off with Serafina and her Pa, explaining a little about their life in the Biltmore Estate. They live in the basement of the estate and no one knows they are living beneath them. Which I find a bit odd that you can live somewhere and no one know you’re there, but the Biltmore is a large place, so it’s possible for someone to go unnoticed, especially a girl like Serafina. To simply put it Serafina is more cat-like and she’s excellent at sneaky around undetected. Which does her good when she’s roaming the halls of the estate at night catching mice. But one night things change and a girl goes missing. Seraphina sees what happens to the girl and freaks out. She tries to convince her Pa, but he refuses to believe her. I ultimately feel he refuses for more reasons than is let on here, and a lot of that gets wrapped up as the story progresses. So, Serapina does what any child would do, she investigates. Though I don’t think most twelve year old children can say they’ve done what she’s done, and if you can then kudos to you because you’re a bravery twelve year old than I was. Ultimately Serafina and the Black Cloak is a story of friendship and one girl desperately wanting to belong to the world that doesn’t know she exists. She wants to be seen instead of just see, she wants to interact instead of daydream of interacting. And if you’ve been hidden for your whole life wouldn’t you want that too? And rather than hiding, like her Pa, she takes the challenge, regardless of the danger. And she does it because deep down she knows she’s something different and she knows the woods contains what she is, and she knows she’s the only one that can stop the man in the black cloak.

Overall, I liked the story. The writing, however, was rough in patches. Serafina and the Black Cloak ought to be my kind of book, but it didn't quite deliver for me. The strong beginning hooked me, and is what made me buy the book in the first place. Unfortunately, the writing didn't stay so strong throughout. I have noticed this is Beatty's first book, and hopefully, he has improved with the subsequent ones, but this story contains many beginning-writer mistakes, such as: occasional overuse of adverbs, word repetition, overuse of pronouns or character's name, use of the word "suddenly", use of the phrase "began to", overuse of intrusive dialogue tags, and unnatural sounding dialogue, at times. I also felt like the end of the book dragged on for too long. The middle, too, got really slow for me. If I didn't like the story so much, I would give this two stars rather than three, but, again, I really did like the story overall. The execution was rather lacklustre though. I think it could have used a few more revisions before going to publication. Hopefully, Mr Beatty has improved his writing with subsequent books.

Serafina has a secret: she lives in her hidden home under the pipes of Biltmore Estate. Her dad can fix things and is indispensable to the workings of the Estate, its owner an early adopter of the newfangled electricity. Pa is capable, gruff, a poor communicator, and loves his daughter dearly. Serafina is odd and her Pa protects her by hiding her. She knows she's different, but doesn't know she's special. She has unusual hair and eyes, and was born with four toes. Her activities are solo and friendless. Then things begin to happen: a relative of the Vanderbilt's, orphaned nephew Braeden, arrives at the estate with only his beloved dog. Houseguests are not what they seem. And something bad is happening to guests... This book helps show that different has a purpose. Dreaming of inclusion, the outsider watching the deluxe goings-on of Vanderbilt guests and relatives brings something to the table. She who doesn't belong helps chase a great mystery: children are disappearing. Placing herself at risk of discovery and expulsion, Serafina exhibits brave resolve and a kind heart. She befriends Braeden, at risk of exposure, pushes on despite her terror, and is true to herself and stubborn when it counts. The setting of Biltmore Estate in its early days provides a groomed and beautiful period mansion and grounds, with gracious and literate hosts offering entertainment in nightly salons. The very near wild woods with superstitions and rumors of an abandoned forest community add an edge of danger and mystery. Historical setting and technology of the era make for a nice time capsule, and the hints of magic added make this story sparkle. This curious mix of fact and history, 1910s technology and innovation, local superstition, western North Carolina animal lore, and a glimpse of the grand and privileged lives in the era of Downton Abbey, a dash of Neil Gaiman 'what-if' magical lore thrown in, make this an engaging read. Written for young adult/kids, it's a romp for adults too. For me, juvenile fiction has a great ability to communicate directly with the reader. It is written simply, and offers elements of period technology and engineering to make the reader consider what lies under an elegant edifice. The odd-girl-out heroine hesitantly makes choices of heroism and self-sacrifice, and her courage to walk a path of fear made me turn pages faster as the story rushed to its close. Final events were unexpected, it keeps you guessing what is to happen next. I wish the ending offered even more backstory at its conclusion, for I did not want it to end. A good kids book takes you further. and the book's setting merits a look. Serafina makes me want to visit The Biltmore Estate and consider the support it takes to run a mansion. I can't wait to see if Disney makes a film. I received an advance copy for review and enjoyed it, and passed it on to juvenile readers. Also found a video trailer for the book online.

This was a great story and I wish there were more kid's horror books to choose from. It did drag a little in places but overall it was good.

This is a story about a young girl serafina and how her life changed when a certain event happened...this is a great middle grade book with a touch of whimsy and bravery..go for it..this book will not disappoint you..I give it 5 stars..🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Serafina and the Black Cloak is a sensitive, evocative piece of writing. Serafina herself is a quite wonderful literary creation and one who generations of children, boys as well as girls, will surely delight in discovering. Equally her rapidly, but deeply developing friendship with Braeden, the young master of the house - friendship that she has never before encountered except in books - is quite wonderfully and touchingly drawn. Both young protagonists personify admirable and most likeable characteristics, whilst remaining convincingly human and vulnerable. Serafina's gutsy determination and fierce loyalty, tempered but never daunted by her very real insecurities, are conveyed every bit as strongly as the author seems to have intended. For these qualities alone this would be a notable book. But I have not yet reached the real reasons for its unique and very special appeal. Interspersed within the lyricism of this narrative are several passages of high tension, high adrenaline action, again skilfully, but now thrillingly, written. However, this is not the whole picture either. For very gently and subtly the elements of strangeness, of mystery, of horror even, are introduced and built through this lyrical narrative. There are weird goings on in house and in the nearby woods.There are strange things about Serafina too, of which she herself is only all too well aware. The story edges further towards the supernatural. As readers, we begin to feel less sure of our ground. What seemed initially to be Serefina's fanciful imagining creeps closer to reality. Then, in the truly amazing, compulsively exciting climax, the story, helter-skelters into a new understanding. Less well handled, these startling developments could have seemed inconsistent with the earlier tenor of the story. However, such is this author's skill that, once the shocking revalations are reached, we readers see that the seeds of its shifted reality were there all along, even in such subtle clues as the chapter head embellishments. It all makes sense to us in the end, as well as to Serafina, even if it took us a while to fully register quite what sort of world we were vicariously sharing.

È un middle grade, quindi la lettura è scorrevole e i termini non sono complicatissimi. Io non sono super fluente in inglese e l'ho letto abbastanza facilmente. La storia è bella e avventurosa, probabilmente se non l'ha già fatto Disney ci farà un film/serie. Consigliato

I can’t stay away from children’s fantasy adventures for very long and this yarn, published a decade ago does not disappoint. The story drips with suspense as Serafina, a girl hidden in the basement of Biltmore Estate, aims to uncover the mystery of the Man in the Black Cloak before all the children vanish one at a time.