Fantasies at Rowan Public Library

 by  Edward Hirst Rowan Public Library

Fantasies have been a part of some of the most celebrated works of literature and have long been popular with readers because authors place their characters into worlds where the unexpected and unexplained happens. 

The novel Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce tells the story of a teenager who took a walk in the woods one day from her home in the English countryside and disappeared. Twenty years have passed when the doorbell rings at her family’s home on Christmas Day and there Tara stands. Tara doesn’t seem to have aged at all and claims that she had only been gone for six months and had been abducted by fairies.

In Neil Gaiman’s novel The Ocean at The End of The Lane a forty something year old man returns to the small English town where he grew up to attend a funeral.  On his way to visit with friends and family after the service he takes a detour to see the place where his old home once stood. He is drawn further into his past down a winding country lane to a dilapidated old farmhouse. Arriving there he begins to reflect on his childhood and the dark things that happened.

The Returned by North Carolina author Jason Mott begins with a knock on the door of an elderly couple in the small town of Arcadia, North Carolina.  While his wife Lucille Hargrave watches television in the living room, Harold answers the ringing doorbell on a sunny afternoon to find a government agent on their doorstep with a young child.  Their child Jacob, who died when he was eight years old, has returned. Their story becomes one of many as the deceased start turning up, looking for their loved ones, and the living attempt to grapple with what it all means.

Helene Wecker writes about New York City at the turn of the century in The Golem and the Jinni. She combines the magical realm in which golems and jinnis exist with New York’s enclaves of tenements and immigrants. The Jinni, a magical being of fire, born in the Syrian desert,  finds Chava, a Jewish creature made of mud, and the adventure begins. Wecker explores what it is to be human describing the interactions of these mythical creatures with New York citizens. 

These fantasies and others can be brought to life through books at Rowan Public Library.