Note: enter to win a 21-book sampler below.

Like many of you, I’m a home-school girl, and I love to read. At nineteen I was discouraged with the YA and fantasy books available in my library. I’d devoured the clean reads and was repeatedly forced to put down excellently written books because the stories were immoral or had a twisted worldview. (By “immoral” I mean sexual inappropriateness or violence for the sake of violence or bad language.)

I hated seeing despair running rampant in contemporary authors’ YA and fantasy. In my Oregon home one day, I thought, Maybe I could write good books about hope and adventure. So my journey began.

By the time I started my second medieval fantasy, I was again discouraged. I had not completed the first book. I’d given up too easily.

So I told the Lord I would finish this second book unless He showed me He wanted me to do something else. Eventually I discovered my second book was the bare bones of two: Falcon Heart and the sequel, Falcon Flight. With God’s help and the assistance of countless people, I did not give up!

The second book, Falcon Flight, is coming out this  month. I’m throwing a family-friendly 21-book giveaway here to celebrate, with the help of many of the authors of great-and-clean YA books I’ve met along the way.

You can even get my first book for free, 5/13 – 5/16: I’m giving free Falcon Heart Amazon downloads. The brand-new sequel Falcon Flight will be on sale for $0.99 here.

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Azalea Dabill grew up in the California hills, building forts in the oaks. She remembers the fuzzy sweet smell of acorns and moss, the perfume of lupines and golden poppies, the night-song of crickets. Homeschooled, she read fantasy and adventure to her siblings. Now she enjoys growing things, old bookstores, and hiking the wild.

Not finding enough tales of adventure, romance, and mystery in the world, she writes young adult fantasy. Mythic tales of medieval stronghold lords, a desert prince, and a stronghold daughter; a sword of power and a princess running for her life; an outcast at the dawn of time caught in a dragons’ war; and a tale of sleeping Briar Rose and her sister and the battle for their hearts. Mythic fantasy spans worlds near and far, past and future, worlds of wonder and adventure.

Azalea took writing for her Associate of Science and devoured how-to books from James Scott Bell to Sol Stein. A member of the Christian Proofreaders and Editors Network, she holds an editing certificate from the American Copy Editors Society.