Merrie Haskell grew up half in North Carolina, half in Michigan. Her first three novels are The Princess Curse, Handbook for Dragon Slayers, and The Castle Behind Thorns. She has won the Schneider Family Book Award (Middle Grades) and the DetCon1 Middle Grade Speculative Fiction award, and she was twice a finalist for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Merrie lives in Saline, Michigan and works in a library with over 7.5 million bound volumes.