When Virginia Duncan first read The Thief, she "hurled the book across the room in complete and utter disgust." She felt “tricked, cheated, fleeced” by the author and her thief. Duncan had just been hired by Susan Hirschman, founder of Greenwillow Books and editor of The Thief, and her assignment was to read her way through a box of books during the six-week vacation leading up to her start date. Luckily, Megan Whalen Turner's manuscripts no longer elicit that response. The day the manuscript for The Queen of Attolia arrived, she and Hirschman and Phyllis Larkin, Turner's copy editor on the first three books, all read it that day. "I remember being awestruck and I remember falling in total love with it, Gen and Megan," Duncan said. "And of course, I had to re-read The Thief." The third book, The King of Attolia, inspired what Duncan called "the best thing that ever happened to me as an editor." Shortly before Hirschman's retirement, she and Duncan and Turner were together at a conference in California, sharing lunch outside on a beautiful day. They'd been waiting for the King of Attolia manuscript, but Turner didn't have it. She did, however, offer to "tell [them] the manuscript." Duncan said they sat for hours as Turner told them the entire novel, almost paragraph by paragraph. "If she hadn't worked something out--this is one of my favorite things about her--there would be a parenthetical statement like 'very funny scene here about Gen eating dinner,' " Duncan recalled. When, months later, Duncan received the manuscript (Hirschman had retired by then), she said, "I could hear [Megan's] voice in my head--it was almost verbatim." Duncan, now v-p and publisher of Greenwillow, publishes other series, including Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci books, but, she said, what makes Turner unique is the way each book in the series is told in such a different way. "I can't wait to see what she'll do with the next two books. Hurry up, Megan!" she added.