Margi Preus Books In Order

Publication Order of Northwoods Books

Publication Order of Samurai Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Picture Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Margi Preus
Author Margi Preus’ writing career started when a kindergarten audition went terribly wrong. Since then, she’s written nearly a bazillion plays, and a ton of books.

This includes “Heart of a Samurai”, which won Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the Newbery Honor book. “West of the Moon” won the Minnesota Book Award and “The Clue in the Trees” received the Midwest Bookseller’s Choice Award.

Margi’s books have been picked as an NPR Backseat Book Club selection, honored as ALA/ALSC Notables, landed on the New York Times Bestseller list, and won multiple awards.

She earned her undergraduate degree from Luther College and graduate degree from Binghamton University. She taught at The College of St. Scholastica, University of Minnesota Duluth.

She worked for 25 years as the artistic director of Duluth’s Colder by the Lake Comedy Theatre, writing, producing, and directing operas, adaptations, sketches, and plays.

Margi switched to children’s books when her older son discovered the magic of books when he was two or three years old. He wanted his mom to read him one book after the next, and he would watch her lips and her eyes, look at the page, then back at her mouth and face.

She knew that he was putting it all together, those little squiggles on the page made her say words which had meaning. That was a huge part of her inspiration, of wanting to try her hand at writing books.

“West of the Moon” was inspired by the art and the writings of Linka, her real great-great-grandma, who came with her husband to America in 1851, leaving Norway. However the characters and its story is not nearly as connected to history as in her previous books. Margi spun a mere few lines of text from Linka’s diary into a magical mixture of adventure, folklore, and myth that is set in the sometimes forbidding, sometimes gorgeous mid-19th century Norwegian mountainside.

It was also the brief mention Linka made of a girl that she met on the ship to America which revved her imagination up. As she read the lines in the diary she wondered what sort of girl would get on board a ship heading for America, not knowing anybody? She thought she’d see if she could figure a story out for her.

“Heart of a Samurai” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2010. A Japanese fishing vessel sinks in the year 1841. Its crew is forced to swim to this unknown tiny island, where they get rescued by an American ship that’s just passing by. Japan’s borders are still closed to all Western nations, so the crew gets ready to go to America, learning English along the way.

Manjiro, a boy of fourteen, is eager and curious to learn all that he can about this new culture. Eventually Manjiro is adopted by the captain who takes him back home in New England. The boy lives for quite a while in New England, before heading to San Francisco to pan for gold.

After many years, he heads back to Japan, just to get imprisoned as an outsider. With his own hard-won knowledge of the West, he’s in a unique position to persuade the shogun to ease open all of the boundaries around Japan. He might even be able to achieve his unlikely dreams of becoming a samurai.

“Enchantment Lake” is the first novel in the “Enchantment Lake Mystery” series and was released in the year 2015. One disturbing call from her great aunts Jeannette and Astrid sends Francie, age seventeen, far from her New York home and into a tangle of mysteries. Ditching this one audition in a Manhattan theater, she travels to some isolated lake located in the northwoods where her aunts’ neighbors are “dropping like flies” from some odd accidents. Are they really accidents though?

Out on the shores of Enchantment Lake out in the woods of northern Minnesota, there is something ominous afoot, and while Francie starts investigating, the mysteries continue multiplying: a puzzling confession, spooky noises in the bog, one poisoned hot dish, and one legendary treasure which is said to be under enchantment, or is that under Lake Enchantment? Right at the center of it all is this road that not everybody wants built and a suddenly booming business in cabin sales.

To a somewhat hesitant northwoods Nancy Drew, the intrigue proves to be irresistible, particularly when it draws her closer to the mysteries lurking at the core of her own life: where and who is her mom? What happened to her dad? Who even is she, and where does her heart truly lie, deep in the woods of Minnesota or in the bustle of New York City?

“The Clue in the Trees” is the second novel in the “Enchantment Lake Mystery” series and was released in the year 2017. Theo, Francie’s brother, has got secrets. These are secrets that Francie believes she wants to know. However what if just one of these secrets is that Theo’s actually a killer. Francie, in an effort to avoid pondering such a possibility, plunges into her senior year at a tiny town high school close to Enchantment Lake in Northern Minnesota.

It is a radical change from her private school in New York, however she hopes she can keep an eye on her great aunts and possibly learn more about the mom that she never knew finally. A tiny silver box appears to hold all of the answers, and she is determined to get her hands on it.

However when her long lost brother does turn up, so does a corpse, and yet again Francie gets pulled into a mystery. A long list of suspects, one that Theo is at the top of, and it keeps her head spinning. When she herself becomes a suspect Francie begins feeling like she’s walking on thin ice, however it’s not until she’s literally walking on thin ice when the pieces come together at last. And by that point it may just be too late.

A new school with some new friends, and just a few enemies, the lead role in a play, an encounter with this huge muskie, secret tunnels, archaeological twists, thin ice, and an oddly sticky murder come her way this time around.