Children's/YA book series
I have very distinct memories of reading this series and was sure I remembered the titles but Google is failing me!
It was about a girl who befriends a pair of siblings at her new school and they let her in on their secret, which is that they've found a portal to another world in the countryside near their house. The portal comes out near a city and they've been (I think?) taking artefacts from earth through the portal to make themselves rich.
There was a supporting character who was a goth girl who was also travelling to the other world to learn magic and had a romance with a boy from the other world who might have been royalty. She also befriended a set of twins who were both very powerful mages.
At the end all the characters got trapped in the other world due to a terrorist attack and were forced to escape through another portal. The later books in the series were about their adventures lost in the multi verse, with particular focus on a world called 'the library' which had many portals to other worlds and was filled with books documenting explorers' adventures. I remember a subplot where one of them got conscripted into the military in another world and tried to make the best of the situation by arguing his way into a promotion by claiming to know how to make nuclear weapons.
I'm certain the titles all ended in -land or -lands (Borderland, Shadowland etc.) but Google is only turning up unrelated books. I'm in the UK and it might be that they were published under a different title in the US. This would have been late nineties at the earliest and mid 2000s at the latest.
Does anyone else remember this and know where I might find them? I'm pretty sure I still own them but my childhood books are all boxed up in a storage unit.
ETA: made a last-ditch attempt at Googling it and tried adding 'uk' to the end of my search and the cover I remembered popped up in the shopping results! It is Rites of Passage by Rhiannon Lassiter. I'll leave this post up in case it's of interest to anyone else!
It was about a girl who befriends a pair of siblings at her new school and they let her in on their secret, which is that they've found a portal to another world in the countryside near their house. The portal comes out near a city and they've been (I think?) taking artefacts from earth through the portal to make themselves rich.
There was a supporting character who was a goth girl who was also travelling to the other world to learn magic and had a romance with a boy from the other world who might have been royalty. She also befriended a set of twins who were both very powerful mages.
At the end all the characters got trapped in the other world due to a terrorist attack and were forced to escape through another portal. The later books in the series were about their adventures lost in the multi verse, with particular focus on a world called 'the library' which had many portals to other worlds and was filled with books documenting explorers' adventures. I remember a subplot where one of them got conscripted into the military in another world and tried to make the best of the situation by arguing his way into a promotion by claiming to know how to make nuclear weapons.
I'm certain the titles all ended in -land or -lands (Borderland, Shadowland etc.) but Google is only turning up unrelated books. I'm in the UK and it might be that they were published under a different title in the US. This would have been late nineties at the earliest and mid 2000s at the latest.
Does anyone else remember this and know where I might find them? I'm pretty sure I still own them but my childhood books are all boxed up in a storage unit.
ETA: made a last-ditch attempt at Googling it and tried adding 'uk' to the end of my search and the cover I remembered popped up in the shopping results! It is Rites of Passage by Rhiannon Lassiter. I'll leave this post up in case it's of interest to anyone else!