Linus Baker is a case worker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, a..k.a. DICOMY. He's been doing it for 17 years, is carefully attentive to the regulations, and believes what he's doing--including maintaining distance from the children in the orphanages--is helping to keep the children safe. The orphanages are generally rather stark, and often rundown, but Linus's inspection visits help keep them from being abusive. He has not hesitated to recommend closure of orphanages where he finds the children are being mistreated.
Linus isn't popular at work, or for that matter anywhere. He lives a quiet life, is devoted to his work, loves his old record albums played on his even older Victrola, and cares for his rather cranky cat. It's quite a surprise when, at work, he is summoned to a meeting with Extremely Upper Management, to be given a highly classified assignment. He is to visit the Marsyas Island Orphanage, where there are six very dangerous children.
He isn't even give the files on the children till he's about to leave, and the files are very sparse. However, the children are a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, a were-Pomeranian, a green blob no one has been able to classify, and the Antichrist. Lucifer, a.k.a. Lucy.
Linus needs to determine if these children can continue to be kept safely, or if they are going to trigger the end of the world.
Then there's their caretaker, Arthur Parnassus. There's nothing about Arthur in the files Linus has been given. Arthur proves to be a charming, elegant man, fiercely devoted to his charges, and with a strange lack of any apparent background.
Oh, and there's the ocean, which Linus has longed to see but never has seen, and which absolutely enchants him. As does Arthur, it should be mentioned.
Less appealing is the village on the shore just across from the island, where there's a certain obvious hostility to magical children, homes for them, and those who work with them.
Linus and Arthur grow closer, while Linus also gradually finds that even with these children, he sees them as children, to be protected by him and DICOMY, not to protect the world from. But as he grows closer to Arthur, and learns more about the island and its residents, he realizes that Arthur also has secrets. Possibly a big secret. And that DICOMY may be less benign than he has long thought. That perhaps he has been attributing his own motives to DICOMY.
There's also the little question of how dangerous Lucy really is.
It's a story that really pulled me in, and where we find both magical creatures, and the magic of found family, along with the courage to be who you choose to be, not just who people tell you that you are.
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