Ackerly Green’s Secret Society

Ackerly Green's Secret Society is the first of two epistolary novellas following the novel length Monarch Papers entries in CJ Bernstein's Briar Archive. Wait... what does that mean in English? CJ Bernstein creates immersive online experiences evoking a world of magic and fantasy overlapping with, but hidden from our own. The four published works of the Briar Archive (Monarch Papers: Flora and Fauna, Monarch Papers: Cosmos and Time, Ackerly Green's Secret Society, and The Search for Magiq) are each adaptations of those experiences in narrative form! Much of the novel contains actual text by participants, curated and organized in novella form. Ackerly Green's Secret Society takes place after the events of The Monarch Papers, and features Bernstein's intrepid assistant, Catherine (who is a real person) as the narrative voice, providing cohesion to the contributions of those who participated in the experience itself. The "characters" (who are real-live people like myself who participated in Secret Society) discover hidden magics in the real world that draw them towards the answer of intertwined mysteries that may hold answers to the future of magic itself. As a disclosure, I was a participant in the Ackerly Green's Secret Society experience, as well as a reader post-hoc.