How a New York Times best-selling series came to rely on local teen

How a New York Times best-selling series came to rely on local fan

in Community/Featured and

A Miss California contestant representing Redwood City recently recounted a fascinating story about how she became a consultant for The New York Times’ best-selling children’s books series, The Kingdom Keepers.

On Friday, a blog post published on the Miss California website details how, at age 11, Brooke Muschott became a big fan of the Kingdom Keepers series, reading the books so many times that she managed to notice inconsistencies in the stories. Throughout her summer between her sophomore and junior years in high school, Muschott marked every inconsistency in the series with Post-it notes and then pointed them out to the series’ author Ridley Pearson during a book signing event at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park.

“…I took my books to be signed, post-its and all,” Muschott said. “And when Ridley asked me what the sea of pink and blue tabs sticking out the sides of his books was about, I told him they were inconsistencies.”

In what Muschott calls the “plot twist of all plot twist,” Pearson was not offended, but instead asked her to read an unreleased book from the series and search for inconsistencies in the story.

That encounter was a life-changer for Muschott, who “went from average high school student to continuity editor, and then a researcher, brainstormer, events and social media assistant on a New York Times bestselling series.”

Ridley even wrote her into the 7th book as a character, she said. At 19, she was a co-writer for one of the books.

Muschott went on to major into creative writing at Pepperdine University, where she studied abroad in Buenos Aires and Shanghai and interned at Shanghai Disney Imagineering. She currently works as an editorial and research associate at Ampersand and has her sights set on the Miss California competition, which will take place in June and is a prelim to the Miss America competition.

Photo credit: Hart Photography/posted to the Facebook.com/MissRedwoodCity.