A Tale of Magic...

About A Tale of Magic...

Set generations before the events of The Land of Stories, in the same fairy-tale world, A Tale of Magic... follows Brystal Evergreen, a young woman living in a kingdom where practicing magic is a capital crime, who discovers she has magical abilities of her own. When Brystal is recruited into a secret academy training the kingdom's few surviving fairies, witches and sorcerers in secret, she's pulled into a fight not just to control her own powers but to win basic legal recognition and safety for magical people across the kingdoms.

Chris Colfer wrote the trilogy as a more explicit allegory for prejudice and persecution than the original series -- the magical community's criminalization, and the fear and misinformation that sustain it, map deliberately onto real-world discrimination, and Colfer has spoken about writing the books partly in response to the political climate around LGBTQ+ rights during the period he was writing them. It's a notably darker, more overtly political trilogy than the main Land of Stories series, while keeping the same fairy-tale-world setting and Colfer's accessible middle-grade voice.

The trilogy takes place decades before Alex and Conner Bailey are born, and its events and worldbuilding feed directly into the mythology established across the main six-book series -- Colfer designed it as a prequel meant to be read with that context already in hand, not as an introduction to the world.