Jelani Marsh finds a glass slipper on the city sidewalk and tries it on for laughs. The slipper shatters, slicing her foot, and dozens of tiny men scatter from the bloody remains. A moment later, her foot is miraculously healed and they’re gone.

This is the first in a series of meetings that will unravel everything she knows. In the following weeks, the sassy barista from Missoula, Montana, will learn she is not an orphan, as she’d been taught to believe, and that her life story has been a deception, right down to the circumstances of her birth. A menace arises from her family’s past that could threaten everything she holds dear, including her own life.

Two groups help untangle the mystery: her human friends—life skills coach Iris Pallaton, computer geek and gamer extraordinaire Lane Donatelli, and “Crispy” Mendell, an agoraphobic abuse survivor—and her new-found elf companions, Daven Talvi and Astan Hawk. Can she learn about her true roots and absorb the implications of her new life in time to save her friends, her family,  herself?