Children of the Crows: “A girl who died. A version that shouldn’t exist. A story that refuses to let her go.”

Children of the Crows

Book One of the Crowmarked Saga
By Laura Carpenter
Tagline: A girl who died. A version that shouldn’t exist. A story that refuses to let her go.

Syra Ward remembers dying.

She remembers the crows, their impossible wings glitching through a broken sky. She remembers the fire under her skin, the scream that split her chest, and the voice that whispered a name she was never supposed to say again—her own. She remembers falling from a rooftop that no longer exists, bleeding through a version of herself that shouldn’t have survived.

But when she wakes in a city that’s wrong in all the right ways—where streetlights stutter and time frays at the edges—Syra isn’t just alive. She’s marked.

A crowmark now burns across her chest, alive with shadow and memory, proof that she has slipped between timelines. That she is a breach in the story. That she’s being hunted.

By memory merchants who peddle grief like gold.
By static-eyed crows who devour forgotten versions.
By storytellers who rewrite the living to preserve the lie.

And still, she is not alone.

Drawn to her are three others—Riven, Mira, and Echo. Marked rebels, version-runners, and survivors of their own erased pasts. Together, they navigate a city folding in on itself, searching for the place where Syra once died, and the truth buried in the version she broke.

They guide her through The Market, where memories are traded for blood and feathers. Through courthouses where ghosts sentence stories to oblivion. Through vaults of doors that only open for the ones who remember too much.

Each step takes her closer to the key she’s forgotten, the mother she thought was dead, and the truth that’s waited across every shattered version of her life:

She made a promise.
She broke it.
And now the story wants its price.

⭐ What you’ll find inside:

• Lyrical dark fantasy with deep psychological roots

• Found family, queerness, and memory as resistance

• Urban-folkloric worldbuilding with crow mythology and glitch timelines

• A heroine torn between survival and remembrance

• Soft romance, chosen loyalty, and aching second chances

• Rich prose, devastating beauty, and hope that refuses to die

🖤 If you loved:

• This Is How You Lose the Time War

• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

• Ninth House or The Ten Thousand Doors of January

• Or any story where memory is magic and grief becomes your map…

…then you will never forget Children of the Crows.

Early readers say:

“A fever-dream you never want to wake from. Raw, intimate, unforgettable.”
“Syra is every part of us that survived what should have broken us. I’ll never read the word ‘version’ the same way again.”
“If crows told fairy tales about trauma, resistance, and girlhood—they’d sound like this.”
“One of the best books I’ve read this decade. Visceral. Electric. Cinematic.”

Syra Ward is supposed to be dead.
But the crows have other plans.
And this time, she’s writing the ending herself.

📖 Start reading Children of the Crows now — Book One in the Crowmarked Saga.
The story is alive.
The memory is burning.
And some versions never stay buried.