Books in Ren Crown series

Barely surviving her first term at college, all Ren wants to do over break is relax and bond with her roommate—not get eaten by a sentient building or attacked on the street. But with increasingly open warfare brewing between the magical factions and Layers of the world, this time, Ren will not fail in making sure everyone she loves stays safe and protected. That includes doing things like filling her parents' house with personal art heavily embedded with wards, bubble-wrapping her increasingly imperiled roommate, and even making sure that a certain sexy thorn-in-her-side continues to breathe free air. Finding herself on duty protecting the entire university alongside campus god Alexander Dare...was not what she'd had in mind. But this time it's not only her life on the line. And Ren will do anything to protect those she loves.

Reeling from what the students at Excelsine University are calling "Bloody Tuesday," Ren is determined to regather her magical family. But the events of the attack were not without multiple costs. Magically broken and exposed, Ren is ripe pickings for multiple factions that want to use and chain her, and the Department is the scariest of the pack. With only a limited amount of time to save her friend, and confined with the rest of the student body awaiting their fate, Ren stands a mere hairsbreadth from losing her freedom completely with each and every decision she makes.

Florence Crown was a normal seventeen-year-old girl quietly navigating her senior year in the shadow of her popular twin, then came magic, and devastation. Taken to another layer of the world where magic reigns supreme, transportation is instantaneous, mages transcend death, and creatures perform their own enchantments, Ren is locked away--a secret inside a secret world. Possessing a rare form of art and creation magic, Ren breaks free and illegally haunts the libraries and laboratories of the prestigious Excelsine University, where every crevice of the mountain campus is filled with extraordinary magic, and where anything within the realm of imagination is possible--including overturning death. Determined to reverse what happened the night her world transformed, and surrounded by brilliant magic users who could help--or enslave--her, Ren becomes part of an elite group of unconventional students who delight in skating the edge of the forbidden. But caught up in a painted universe of layers, hidden agendas, and factions on the brink of war, Ren has to discover just how far she can bend reality before she breaks--and annihilates every layer of the world around her.

The rise always proceeds the fall... After the events of winter term, Ren wants nothing more than to take a deep breath and be normal—spend some time with her friends, maybe enjoy the festival where shifts are continually unleashed to re-sort everything in the magical world, perhaps actually do something about a particular boy… But the Department has started a sinister and highly effective campaign, one that threatens everything Ren has built. When unexpected faces and betrayal crop up from her past, she must do anything except engage. But when a terrible secret is revealed, nothing will stop her from unleashing her destiny.