Summary

Chapter 1 of Robert Beatty’s Serafina and the Black Cloak (Kindle Edition) begins when Serafina wakes up in the middle of the night while her father still sleeps. Serafina is a twelve-year-old girl who secretly lives with her father in the basement of the Biltmore Estate,

Serafina gets up and starts hunting for rats, something that she does every night. She catches two. One bites her. She does not like it when rats bite her, but the bite does not phase her. Instead of killing the rats, she lets them go. In the past, she would kill the rats and present them later to her father. It is her job to catch rats as she is Biltmore Estate’s Chief Rat Catcher, a title her father gave her when she had asked whether she had a job like others on the estate...