Authors Cassandra Clare and Holly Black have been best friends since they met 12 years ago at Black's first book signing in New York City. They share a childhood love of J.R.R. Tolkien, Star Wars and Batman, they both have cats, and live 10 minutes from each other in west Massachussetts.
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"I really wanted more writer friends and she seemed a likely prospect," jokes Black. "We loved so many of the same books."
Black is the co-creator of the Spiderwick Chronicles. Her 2013 novel Doll Bones, about the spooky happenings around a doll containing the ashes of a murdered girl, was named a Newberry Medal honour winner.
Clare started in the fan-fiction world and her first published volume of a teen fantasy series about demon-fighting Shadowhunters became a New York Times bestseller.
They'd teamed up a few times on shorter projects, have written side-by-side and referenced each other's characters in their stories so it wasn't a total leap into the unknown when Black came up with the idea to write a chosen-hero narrative with a twist and suggested they do it together.
"We were on tour together and we were in an airport," Clare says. "I was reading a Rick Riordan book, and I commented on how I loved middle-grade [fiction for children aged about eight to 12], but didn't know if I could write it since I never had.
"And Holly said, 'I have written middle-grade. What if we did it together?' We started talking about the idea, and by the time we got on the plane, we had the whole character of Callum nailed down, along with his backstory, and the world, almost all the stuff that would happen in the five books."
At first glance there are thematic similarities between The Iron Trial and the Harry Potter series: a reluctant boy magician, marked at birth, goes to magic school, discovers his destiny is to overcome the evil in himself and to help battle the enemy without.
Callum Hunt walks with a sliding limp, acquired when "the Enemy of Death" killed his mother. He's notorious for driving off substitute teachers but is afraid of magicians, even more afraid that he is one.
Summoned to the Magisterium, he tries to flunk entry exams but his uncontrolled magic is deemed a danger to the world and he is admitted to the labyrinthine magic school with its crystalline walls that seem more Tolkien than Hogwarts.
Weighing into the field of magic school books can be intimidating, Black acknowledges, "but we can't just stop having magic school books after Harry Potter".
"The genre can't just end. Harry Potter is in conversation with the books that came before it -- with Wizard's Hall and Witch Week and Charmed Life and The Worst Witch and The Secret of Platform 13 and Which Witch? and Books of Magic.
"The thing we have to do when we sit down to write a book set in a magic school is to ask if we have something to add to the conversation and we believe that we do."
Clare says she would be surprised if readers got to the end of The Iron Trial "and still thought it was going anywhere that Harry Potter ever went".
"Callum is based a little on a friend of mine who was born with a leg too short: he had more than 20 operations and always limped.
"He talked to me once about how swimming was his favourite thing as a kid, because in the water he was just like everyone else. And that's the magic in the book for Call. When we give him the chance to fly, in the air, he's just like everyone else."
Black never thought of herself as "good at sharing," but she enjoyed the joint artistic process. Clare is the more verbose writer, she says. Black writes in layers so her early drafts are more skeletal than Clare's, which are more fully formed and polished. "I think I am the stricter editor - or at least the more enthusiastic editor," she says. "That's my favourite part."
The Iron Trial
Cassandra Clare and Holly Black
Doubleday Children's, $22.99
