The journey to releasing her new book has been years in the making for Creative Writing major Savannah Falk ’26. Using an idea she’s been ruminating on since a dream she had at 10 years old, Falk began writing during high school–on the bleachers before tennis practice, at night after finishing homework, whenever she could. She continued when she arrived at Arcadia, squeezing in writing sessions between classes and her tennis team commitments. 

The result of the on-again, off-again process is “Heir of Prophecy,” Falk’s debut novel.

“I never fully stopped working on it,” she explained. “This summer, I was determined to polish off the final draft and get it published. I didn’t want to graduate without this project I’d been talking about for so long. It’s finally ready to be read.”

The story revolves around Summer Knightley, an 18-year-old living in the modern world. She finds herself transported to Aeyphelsia, a land riddled with magic and ruled under the tyranny of an evil sorceress. Knightley must complete a quest to rescue an unjustly imprisoned victim of the evil tyrant. 

Falk describes the book as “The Chronicles of Narnia” for adults.

“I also love the classic, nostalgic feeling of fantasy stories,” she explained. “The Narnia books were a huge influence in the plot and how this book turned out.” 

Falk enlisted the help of Callie McGuire ’26 to create the cover art and illustrations. Falk and McGuire, a Studio Art major with a concentration in Painting, have known each other since their first year at Arcadia, making McGuire a logical choice to help Falk draw readers to her book.

“We ended up becoming best friends our freshman year of college because one of my volleyball teammates and other best friend was Savannah’s roommate,” McGuire explained. “We like to say I was the ‘honorary third roommate.’ We all live together now for our senior year.”

Falk and McGuire began working together about a year and a half ago with McGuire reading drafts of the novel in order to get a feel for how she should represent the characters. 

“I told Savannah that if I was going to design her cover, I wanted to read her draft first, and since she was still writing at the time, I was able to read it, create doodles, and write down ideas as I went without much rush,” she said. “We wanted to make sure I captured the aesthetics of the book, as well as some character designing that technically doesn’t exist, such as combining different animals together.”

McGuire used the opportunity to develop a new skill. 

“It just worked out naturally that Savannah was writing a book and I’ve always dreamed of illustrating one,” McGuire said. “This was my first attempt at something more digital, which inevitably inspired me to take more digital illustration classes.”

While McGuire went with digital illustrations, Falk decided to go analog when working on the first draft of her novel. She handwrote the draft, loving how the pencil felt in her hand as she wrote out the words. However, her second novel will not follow the same process.

“I really enjoy handwriting things, so at the beginning, it motivated me to pick up the pencil and keep writing,” she said. “I would never do it again since it took forever to type everything out on my laptop and then go back and add to the story, but I’m glad I have that physical proof that my words filled up an entire notebook.