Series
The Eli Series
Eli Lawrence has spent his whole life a little off in a way nobody can name. The seat next to him on the bus stays empty. People flinch when he gets too close and can't say why. He's decided it's just him, some flaw he can't fix, and he's built a small quiet life around working past it, a best friend who fills his silences, a father doing his best, a mother he lost three years ago and a town he can't wait to leave.
Then he finds out what the wrongness actually is. In this world, every strong feeling soaks into the place it happened and stays there, and a rare few people can feel it. They read what a room holds, borrow the courage or grief still stored in it, and pay for the power with pieces of themselves. Eli is one of them, and he's brought to a hidden school in the mountains to learn how to carry it, an old institution run by families whose names are on all the right buildings and whose reasons are never fully explained to the kids they take in.
What Eli can do isn't quite what anyone expected, and the deeper he goes, the more he realizes the school and the people who run it are not what they present themselves to be. Over five books he has to figure out who to trust, what the adults around him actually want from him, and how much of himself he's willing to spend, in a place that asks more of its students than it ever admits.
It's a coming-of-age story with a real cost attached, grounded and sensory and human, about a teenager learning to feel everything in a world that would rather he didn't ask what it's for.
Book I: The Culling
Some places just feel different. You've probably noticed it yourself. An old hospital that makes your skin crawl even though you can't see anything wrong. Your grandmother's kitchen that wraps around you like a hug the moment you walk in. A battlefield where the air itself feels heavy with something you can't name.
Most people shrug it off. Practitioners don't have that luxury.
In Mudwick's world, magic isn't about wands or spells or chosen ones destined for greatness. It's simpler than that. And messier. Every intense emotion, every death and birth and heartbreak, every moment when someone felt something deeply leaves a residue behind. That residue soaks into places and objects and the land itself. Centuries of human experience, just sitting there, waiting.
Practitioners are the people who can feel it. They can sense what a place holds. Some of them can draw on it, pulling courage from battlefields or focus from libraries or warmth from family homes. A rare few can do even more.
Eli Lawrence is one of these people, but something's off. They don't read places like everyone else. They read people. Touch someone's hand and feel their buried grief. Lock eyes with a stranger and know their secrets. It's been making their life in small-town Ohio pretty much unbearable.
Then someone shows up with answers. A hidden school in Appalachia called Mudwick. A place to learn control. People who understand.
Sounds great, right? Finally somewhere to belong. Finally people who won't flinch when Eli accidentally knows too much.
But Mudwick has history. The families who run the practitioner world have been doing so for generations, and they didn't get that power by asking nicely. There are students who arrive at Mudwick full of potential and leave hollowed out. There's a woman named Miriam destroying sacred places across the country and everyone says she's dangerous. There are teachers with secrets and alliances that go back decades.
The hidden world isn't some magical escape from the regular one. It's got the same problems. Power concentrated in the hands of people who were born with it. Systems that chew up the vulnerable and spit them out. The question of what you do when you discover the institution that promised to help you might have built itself on extraction and exploitation.
Eli just wanted to stop feeling like a freak. What they found instead was a world where feeling too much might be exactly what someone designed them to do.
Book II: The Fracture
Eli Lawrence returns to Mudwick for a second year with a story everyone around him agrees on. The bad thing is over. The people responsible are gone. The school sent an email, the matter is closed, and he's supposed to settle in, find his friends, and learn to carry what he can do.
He can already tell it's a lie. Something in the school's hidden network is dragging, a stutter under everything, a weight hanging off a system nobody can explain. He feels it the moment he arrives, in a place that isn't supposed to be able to feel wrong. And folded into a book in his bag is a note he chose not to think about all summer, from someone who told him he'd finally see these people for what they are, and that when he was ready to do something about it, there was help waiting.
Trouble is, the adults he's meant to trust are the same ones who are always kind, always patient, always holding something back. The deeper Eli looks, the harder it gets to tell who's protecting him and who's managing him, and the more he understands that the rot he thought he'd found the bottom of goes down further than anyone let him believe. Book 2 is the year the ground gives. Friendships get tested, the cost of what he can do keeps climbing, and every warm moment starts carrying a weight he can't quite name.
It's a darker, tighter turn of the screw, still grounded, still sensory, still a story about a teenager learning to feel everything in a place that would rather he stopped asking what it's all for.
