My kids are struggling with a particularly nasty viral cold that’s been going around. My daughter Nora, who reads voraciously (she conquered the entire Harry Potter oeuvre when she was seven and eight), exhausted her supply of library books, and I haven’t had the chance to go replace them. Fortunately, our old friend Erin Manning happened to send along a Kindle edition of her latest book, The Adventures of Ordinary Sam: Book One: The Sand Stone. Here’s the Kindle description:

Sam Oldfield is an ordinary kid with an ordinary life. Or is he? When he wakes up in a hospital he is told he’s been missing for three days—so why does he remember nearly a year’s worth of adventures in a magical kingdom in another world?

Was all of it a dream? Did Sam really imagine a wise old magician, a cranky but loyal bird, a beautiful bossy princess, and the Sand Stone itself, whose power Sam alone could wield? That can’t be true. But if the magical world of Ebdyrza and all of Sam’s memories are real, then there really is an Enchanter’s War, too. And the Enchanters may end up in Sam’s world seeking to destroy the Sand Stone, and Sam with it.

Nora just handed me back my iPad; she had been reading it on my Kindle app. Here’s the actual dialogue we had:

“I love fantasy books, and that is probably the best one I’ve ever read. It was so well-written!”

“How do you mean, the ‘best’ you’ve ever read?” I asked.

“Better than Harry Potter.”

“No, really?”

“I’m serious. It was that good.”

This is a little girl who comes home from the library with ten or more books in her bag. If she says the book was that good, I take it seriously. You can also get it in a paperback version.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to Erin’s blog, And Sometimes Tea.