Life isn’t always a fairy tale: Just ask Meg Rosenthal, a wife and mother who's one dissertation shy of a Masters degree when she finds out the hard way that not every woman gets the happy ending that childhood stories promise. Newly widowed, she leaves a wealthy suburb of Long island to be a professor at a private boarding school in upstate New York with her teenage daughter Sally in tow. While author Carol Goodman connects Meg’s story with that of the school’s mysterious past, narrator Jen Taylor shifts back and forth effortlessly between Meg’s first-person take on modern-day life at the school including the baffling death of a student, the secretive headmistress, and Meg’s efforts to connect with Sally and her reading of a diary written 50 years earlier. in a novel where almost every character is female, Taylor gives each her own distinct personality and voice, from the creaky rasp of an aging faculty member to the breathy tone of a young woman in love.

The new teaching position is more than just a job for Meg. The school’s founders, Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt, were two progressive female artists whose children's fairy tale, The Changeling, has been the subject of Meg's professional studies for more than a decade and who, upon their deaths, left behind a generation of unanswered questions. When Meg stumbles onto Lily’s long-lost journal, she begins to slowly untangle the lives and loves of both women, delving into the rumors and conflicts that have plagued the school and the surrounding town of Arcadia Falls for decades. While the characters in both eras deal with similar issues (children, parents, careers, lovers, societal pressures), Taylor’s smooth tone enhances both the eeriest moments and the calmest and though the narration is a little overeager during some of the more emotional moments, that doesn’t take away from the revelations that fill the second half of the book or from a final-hour twist that could give Meg the happily-ever-after she never expected. Blythe Copeland