The Fairy Tale Girl - Hardcover

THE FAIRY TALE GIRL Based on the diaries Susan has kept since she was in her twenties, The Fairy Tale Girl is an illustrated memoir, designed in Susan's trademark style with original watercolors and personal photographs. The Fairy Tale Girl is an age-old story of love and loss, mystery and magic that begins in a geranium-colored house in California and ends up, like any good fairy tale, on the right side of the rabbit hole, in a small cottage in the woods on the New England Island of Martha's Vineyard. As we've heard so many times, it's not the destination, it's the journey. So, journey back to the olden days with Susan, to the 1900s, to the land of Happily Ever After, where men were men and girls were girls who just wanted to have fun ~ bring a hankie 'cause we think you might need it. The Fairy Tale Girl began as just one volume but by the time it was finished, when art and photos were added, it was almost 700 pages, too big, so Susan decided to turn it into two books. The second book will be coming soon after the first, and will be called Martha's Vineyard, Isle of Dreams. Both The Fairy Tale Girl and Martha's Vineyard, Isle of Dreams (pub May 2015) are prequels to Susan's last book, A Fine Romance: Falling in Love with the English Countryside (pub Aug. 2013).

In 1977, the year I turned thirty, three life-changing things happened. I got married. I got a kitty. And I painted my first picture. All of it went into the diaries I’ve been keeping since I was in my 20s, because most of the time, my life has felt like a miracle and I didn’t want to forget any of it. And that’s what The Fairy Tale Girl is about. It’s an illustrated memoir, watercolored and hand-lettered, taken from my diaries and photo albums; a story of growing up in the lovely 1950’s as the oldest of eight children, coming of age in the 1960s and '70s, discovering art, cooking, feminism, rock and roll, and love. When my heart was broken into a thousand pieces, and the grief was so terrible I was inspired to run away from home in the naïve hope of escaping the pain, I never gave up believing in and searching for my childhood dreams of happily ever after. If you like time travel, I think you’ve come to the right place.With Love, Susan Branch