Ninth House meets Babel for fans of myth and folklore in this contemporary fantasy about a Korean-American college student at a magical university where fairy tales intersect with family heritage to unleash powers beyond imagining.

“You always wanted magic to be real.”

Sharon and her daughter V’s points of origin hold common threads—both Korean American teenagers, raised by single mothers and searching for identity in the California suburbs. But during a finals week celebration, high schooler V, compelled by strange impulses, crawls into a hollow tree trunk. That night in a fever haze, she sees gleaming strands of illegible text hovering over her body—flowing between her and her mother, leading to a long-forgotten diary.

With the aid of a luminous quill, a fountainhead of Sharon’s memories spill onto the faded pages. V witnesses her mother map out her past through drawings, diagrams, and reclaimed histories of her brief time at Alvsdahl, an exclusive East Coast college. Here, legacies and heiresses claimed descent from Bluebeard or Cinderella, grappling for control over family stories that could grant them terrifying abilities or burn them to ash. An Asian girl with an unknown inheritance was no one—until her discoveries cracked open Alvsdahl’s secrets.

Sharon’s rewritten narrative—of classroom rivalries, animal professors, debauchery in the woods, threatening Godmothers, and world-shattering powers—unfolds line by line as V desperately tries to help her mother, ultimately learning how to wield Sharon’s story to transform them both.

Lyrical and tender, Angela Mi Young Hur’s The Loom Tree is a magical campus novel centering two young women walking the thorny path toward adulthood, the fractures between parents and their children, and the global mythologies connecting us all.