Anna Waldorf-Ocampo wants to get away from the ever-present scrutiny that comes with her famous name. She will do anything to avoid dealing with her ruthless older half sister, Elizabeth, although she gets along with her belittled other half sister, Olivia. Tragedy strikes when their father is felled by a mysterious illness that has no cure. The family’s only hope lies in a bird called the Adarna, a mythical creature that can only be found in the Philippine jungle. The three sisters are each tasked to search for the elusive creature. Whoever retrieves it first will inherit their father’s billion-dollar empire, but they must hurry, or they will lose their father forever.

The day after Karina's sixteenth birthday, supernatural things start to happen around her and she has no idea why. Her mother, who disappeared soon after they migrated from the Philippines to America, speaks to her in prophetic dreams. Stranger still is the old man who turns up at her house one day and claims to be her grandfather, even though Karina's mother had told her he died a long time ago. Karina discovers that her mother is an engkanto princess who ran away from Engkantasia. Karina is now of age to take the throne and must do so to prevent a war between Engkantasia and the human world. She must learn to control her powers and fight a range of weird creatures trying to kill her and her family. To make matters worse, she finally meets a boy she likes and there's something about him she can't quite figure out.

This novel is on the one hand a young man’s frustrated attempt to write the great Filipino novel, and on the other, his coming to terms with the futility of his search for his lost mother. Along the way, he is guided and misdirected by some muses and demons to reimagine his personal past without the burden of national history. He will be forced to accept that truth can somehow be in the deceptive, inchoate recreation of memories, without which, the fall seems inevitable.

Everything is a struggle for Karina after she took over her mother's role as the next heir in Engkantasia-she faces lukewarm reception from the royal guild who doubts her capability to rule the kingdom well, she yearns for the family she left in the human world, and she has to beat the daughter of one of the council leaders who challenged her for the throne. Feeling lost, she wanders around the kingdom and stumbles upon the mysterious Untraveled Forest, where she soon finds herself in the midst of a secret plot to take over the two worlds. Now she must find a way to save Engkantasia and the human world from the clutches of the Dark Clans.

To cure their father's illness, three princes set out to capture the elusive and enchanting Adarna bird.