An American teenager discovers that her estranged English grandmother was once a queen in another world in the debut novel from bestselling author and speaker Sarah Arthur. When fourteen-year-old Eva Joyce unexpectedly finds herself spending the summer at Carrick Hall, the mysterious manor house of the English grandmother that she's never met before, troubling questions arise. Why the estrangement between her parents and her grandmother? What's going on with the Hall's employees and their guarded secrets? Why must Eva never mention trains, nor her father, nor her favorite childhood fairy tales?
After strange things start happening in the gardens at night, Eva turns to Carrick Hall's elderly housekeeper, its gardener, and the gardener's teenage great-grandson, Frankie, for answers. Astonishingly, they seem to believe the fairy tales are true--that portals to other worlds still exist, though hidden and steadily disappearing. In fact, they suspect that Eva's grandmother was once a queen in one of those worlds. Skeptical at first, Eva soon finds herself torn between the adult world of cold realism and the nostalgic longing for the childhood stories she once loved.
Meanwhile, Eva's grandmother denies it all. After a horrific family tragedy when she was a young woman, her heart is closed to the beauty and pain of her past--and to her only daughter, Eva's mother, as well. It's up to Eva to discover, with Frankie's help, what really happened, whether family relationships can be restored, and if the portals are closed forever. As she unravels generational secrets, she wrestles with her grief for a vanishing childhood--and the fear that becoming an adult means giving up fairy tales forever.
