Lorien Legacies

Nine of us ran when Lorien burned. We came to your planet as children, scattered across your cities, and we learned to answer to names that aren't ours. A charm binds us: we can be killed only in order, one through nine, and the Mogadorians who unmade our world are counting. Three are already gone. I am Number Four. That confiding, hunted first-person voice belongs to Pittacus Lore — a fictional Loric Elder who fronts a series built by James Frey's studio with a rotating hand of collaborators, Jobie Hughes on the opening book. The spine is a seven-novel sequence, from I Am Number Four through The Power of Six, The Rise of Nine, and on to United as One, following the surviving Garde and their guardian Cêpan as their Legacies — telekinesis, fire, stranger gifts — wake in them just as the war they fled arrives on Earth. Around that core orbit the Lost Files novellas, which fill in the numbers and villains the main books rush past, and the sequel trilogy Lorien Legacies Reborn (opening with Generation One), where the powers begin surfacing in human teenagers and a school is built to train them. The register is pure propulsive YA: short chapters, present-tense danger, ordinary high-school cover stories cracking open into alien firefights. Newcomers start exactly where the numbering points — I Am Number Four — and read the seven books in publication order; the novellas and Reborn wait until the invasion is won.