Flora Segunda by Wilce

Wilce lives in Chicago. This her first novel.
Flora lives in CrackPot House, a mansion of thousands of rooms with an elevator that carries folks anywhere it wills unless the rider lets it know it cannot. The result is that you can land in a room you have never seen before and may not be able to immediately find your way to where you want to be. There is also a house butler (elf) that can convince anyone to do his biding if one is not careful to see what he is doing. In this house lives Flora, soon to turn 14 and take on her adult role which has already been chosen for her and which she does not want, her mother Commanding General of the army, and her father, retired and not completely sane. With Flora wherever she goes is Flynn her dog and Udo her best friend. Flora and Udo are mostly on there own. They love adventuring and hope to one day be rangers. Rangers are members of a secret society which some believe do not exist. Certainly Flora's mother and the current rulers do not believe in rangers or in the magic they are said to be able to use. Flora clearly has magic in her and since it is untrained it is also uncontrolled with dangerous, funny, unpredictable results. So on her ranger adventures, Flora releases the house butler from a prison created by her mother and a notorious thief doomed for his dreadful deeds. She unwittingly allows the house butler to control her and she begins to fade away. It takes a wizard from a mysterious house across a a terrible lake to sort her out and stop all the difficulties she has started in her adventuring with her mother none the wiser, but perhaps her father is not as crazy as he seems. Flora and Udo seem rather young 14-year-olds but the story is a funny fantasy, an enjoyable read.
JDW 9/20/07