Samantha wishes she were someone else. Anastasia, to be exact. Anastasia doesn't sit in the corner and read because she's too shy to talk to anyone. She doesn't keep trying and failing. Anastasia slays dragons. Of course, Anastasia is only a character in Samantha's story. That's what Sam does, she writes. She writes to keep the monsters at bay. She creates new worlds to escape into. And she writes to block out the cranky ramblings of her jilted father, who refuses to acknowledge the woman that ran out on them years ago. But Samantha finds herself thrown into a not so magical adventure when she discovers her long lost mother has been in town all along. She has questions that need answering, and a few arrow- accusations... she'd like to sling. But there are obstacles to storming the castle, her father for one. Either Samantha makes this her happily ever after, or it all ends in tears... Either way, the story is about to change.

"When I was born I was so small I was mistaken for a french fry. I was never an ordinary child. My best friend was a seagull. I was also illegal. Artificially intelligent people like me had been banned ever since that thing with the Twelve Elevens. Mother raised me for profit. Buyers and sellers had other plans for me, but then I grew a mind of my own. This is the story of how my brain ended up inside this box." Candles is a black-market, "artificially intelligent person" (or A.I.P., or "ape" in the colloquial sense, as in 'the planet of the'), an organic being, farm-raised on genetically engineered smoothies and destined for auction to the highest bidding criminal enterprise. Gifted with the ability to communicate with foul-mouthed seagulls and ill-tempered felines, this gender-less, age-less, race-less creature has to find its way to escape from the clutches of its mother and other assorted enemies, in this fairly exciting and ultimately utterly unexpected story.