To friends both online and offline who have generously given me their time, their support, and their encouragement as I decided to follow this dream. To name just a few, thanks to Meaghan Hardy, Emily Drash, Laura Rutkowski, Elizabeth Ayral, Chelsea Gillenwater, Emily A. Duncan, Jamie Taker-Walsh, and Jessica Lynn Jacobs. Thank you for reading, for listening to me fret and worry, for believing in me, and for inspiring me with your passion and your immense and varied talents. And thank you to Rhiannon Thomas for taking me under her wing and making this whole debut experience feel a little less intimidating.
A huge thanks goes to my agent, Meredith Kaffel Simonoff. You get me. From the very beginning, you understood the heart of this book, and I owe so much to your insight and your advocacy. You’ve been my compass during this journey—whenever I was unsure of the direction I was going, I only had to check with you and know which way was true north. Special thanks, too, to Ashley Collom for her valuable early feedback.
To my incredible editor, Sarah Dotts Barley, thank you for taking a chance on me and helping me turn this book into something so much more than what it once was. It’s magic, what you do. Thanks as well to Caroline Bleeke, who stepped in with her sharp eye and keen insight while Sarah was on maternity leave.
Thank you so much to Amy Einhorn and everyone at Flatiron and Macmillan—to Patricia Cave, Molly Fonseca, Nancy Trypuc, Jenn Gonzalez, Lena Shekhter, and Liz Catalano. Thank you to Anna Gorovoy, Keith Hayes, Erin Fitzsimmons, and Kelly Gatesman for making this book look so beautiful and elegant inside and out. I’m so proud to be part of Flatiron’s list. Thank you all for turning my pages and pages of a Word document into a real live book.
And lastly, to the women who taught me the power of fairy tales: Shelley Duvall taught me as a child the value in different versions of the same story. Donna Jo Napoli taught me as a teen to look at those stories from all angles. And Angela Carter taught me as an adult how to dig beneath the surface of fairy tales and find the vulnerable, beating heart underneath. I can trace my path to this book through the three of them.