Anne Nesbet writes books for kids and watches a lot of silent films. She lives near San Francisco with her husband, several daughters, and one irrepressible dog. The Cabinet of Earths (HarperCollins 2012) is her first novel; it tells the story of twelve-year-old Maya Davidson's tangle with some very old magic in Paris.

Houses with bronze salamanders for door handles, statues that look too much like Maya’s own worried face, a man wearing sunglasses to hide his radiant purple eyes–nothing is what it seems.

To keep her family safe, Maya must make new friends (a cousin who is so unremarkable, she's actually hard to see; a Bulgarian boy named Valko who has practice not-fitting-in all over the world) and take on the magical underworld of Paris. More adventures of Maya and Valko appear in A Box of Gargoyles, which came out in 2013.