Two Knoxville Teachers Wrote the Fantasy Series Their Students Couldn’t Put Down. The Sequel Just Landed.

The indie YA-fantasy series that won over classrooms and a 4.9-star readership returns to Ensonio in its most ambitious chapter yet.

KNOXVILLE, TN, UNITED STATES, November 12, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — November 12, 2026 — When English teachers Natalea Waller and Emily McKeehan went looking for a fantasy adventure they could hand to any student without a list of caveats, they couldn’t find many. So they wrote it themselves. Five years later, that decision has produced one of East Tennessee’s quiet independent-publishing success stories, and today it continues with the Amazon release of Mapkeeper: Race for the Relics, the second book in their young-adult fantasy trilogy.

The first book, Mapkeeper: Journey Through the North, did what most independently published debuts never do: it found a real readership and kept it. The novel holds a 4.9-star average on Amazon and earned IndieReader’s IR Approved distinction with a 4.5-out-of-5 rating, with reviewer Kara Dennison praising its worldbuilding as immersive and its cliffhanger as hugely enticing. More tellingly, it traveled the way books travel when they work, recommended teacher to parent, shelved in classrooms, pressed into the hands of reluctant readers who finished it and asked for the next one.
Race for the Relics is the answer to that question. It follows fifteen-year-old Greyson Jones deeper into Ensonio, a realm of nine regions he must cross against a tightening deadline, carrying a mysterious mark that makes him the one person alive who can find the relics used as a bargaining tool against his sister’s life. The stakes are no longer abstract. The people Greyson loves most are the price of failure, and the farther he travels, the clearer it becomes that the greatest danger may be closer than the monsters in the wild. The book widens the series’ scope while sharpening its edge, maturing alongside the readers who started with Book One.

“We were basically just like, we should write a book,” McKeehan told WVLT in 2022, recalling the series’ origins. What began as two teachers solving a problem for their own classrooms has become a trilogy with a devoted following and a finished second installment, written, as the first was, to grip adventurous young readers while giving the adults in their lives a fantasy they can trust.

The authors marked the launch with a community release party on November 7 at Berean Christian School in Knoxville, where the series first found its audience among students, teachers, and families.

Mapkeeper: Race for the Relics is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
New readers can start the journey for free: Mapkeeper: Journey Through the North is available at no cost on Kindle from November 13 through 17, a chance to dive into the series from the beginning before continuing with the sequel.

The Books
• Mapkeeper: Race for the Relics — amazon.com/dp/B0HL553N9Y
• Mapkeeper: Journey Through the North — amazon.com/dp/B09MYXXGM9

About the Authors
Natalea Waller and Emily McKeehan are Knoxville-area educators and the co-authors of the Mapkeeper fantasy series. Their years in the classroom and a shared love of imaginative fiction inspired a collaboration built on a simple idea: write the kind of adventure every young reader deserves and every parent can hand over with confidence.

Media Inquiries
Natalea Waller, Co-Author · mapkeeperbook@gmail.com
Author interviews, cover artwork, author photographs, and review copies available upon request.

Natalea Waller
Mapkeeper LLC
mapkeeperbook@gmail.com
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Written By: EIN Presswire