Once Upon a Fairy Tale House: The True Story of Four Sisters and the Magic They Built

by Mary Lyn Ray, Giselle Potter (Illustrator)

Overview

This nonfiction picture book tells the true story of four sisters who used their skills and creativity to bring storybook houses from their childhood fairy tales to life in 1930s Southern California.

Mildred, Harriet, Brenda, and Wilma Moody grew up reading classic fairy tales and inventing their own, wishing they could live in the stories. They imagined storybook houses for themselves and slept there in their dreams every night. As adults, the sisters followed separate career paths until Mildred, an artist, needed a place to paint. Harriet, an architect, sketched plans for a studio that looked like the whimsical abodes from their childhood dreams.

When people saw the enchanting studio, they began to want fairy tale houses of their own. So, Harriet drew more plans, and Mildred decorated the insides, and Brenda and Wilma joined them to take care of the banking and business. Soon, storybook cottages bloomed throughout their tiny town. And when families moved into their new homes, they could all feel just a little bit of the Moody sisters’ fairy tale magic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481479837
Publisher:	Beach Lane Books
Publication date:	05/23/2023
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	40
File size:	146 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Mary Lyn Ray is the author of many picture books for children. Her texts are often praised for their lyricism and emotional depth, and in her works, she frequently focuses on humankind’s relationship with nature. Among her critically acclaimed titles are Stars, Christmas Farm, Pumpkins, The Thank You Book, and Go to Sleep, Little Farm.

Giselle Potter has illustrated many books, including Try It! by Mara Rockliff, All by Himself? by Elana K. Arnold, and Kate and the Beanstalk by Mary Pope Osborne, as well as her own Tell Me What to Dream About, This Is My Dollhouse, and The Year I Didn’t Go to School, about traveling through Italy with her parents’ puppet troupe when she was eight. She lives in Rosendale, New York, with her husband and two daughters. Visit her at GisellePotter.com.

Editorial Reviews

03/27/2023

It’s 1902 in Santa Barbara, Calif., and the Moody sisters, four young siblings who love fairy tales, are sitting on the beach doing what they like best: Mildred draws, Harriett builds sandcastles, Brenda counts beach detritus, and Wilma pushes sand with a toy steam shovel. Though they can’t inhabit the stories they invent at bedtime, Wilma suggests, “We could imagine fairy tale houses and pretend we live in them.” When the four reach adulthood, they build artist Mildred a studio with a roof “like a mother hen’s wings,” and then collaborate to create life-size fairy tale cottages that eschew the time period’s cold modern aesthetic. Harriett, now an architect, designs, Mildred decorates, Brenda takes care of business, and Wilma handles bookkeeping and sales, a rare enterprise in an era when women’s professional options were particularly sparse. In vintage-inflected gouache spreads, Potter (Cher Ami) lavishes detail on the sisters’ clothing, on the California landscape with its palms and gardens, and, as they are built, on the cottages themselves. In a biographical portrait of lifelong collaboration that builds on childhood interests, Ray (Vrooom, Vrooom!) tells a heartfelt story about a group of women whose work unites the gifts of its members. An author’s note offers more context regarding the Moody sisters’ “pixie cottages.” Ages 4–8. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2023-02-08
A true story of how four California sisters turned childhood dreams into architectural reality.

Inspired by fairy tales, Mildred, Harriett, Brenda, and Wilma Moody envisioned rustic cottages in which they pretended to sleep every night, and so years later, when Mildred needed an art studio, they got together to build one—followed by dozens more as community interest in their designs grew. The romanticism is laid on with a trowel in the first part of the narrative: Brenda “liked to count things she found” on the beach and, voila, grew up to be a banker; Harriett liked to build sand castles and so became an architect; and a line at the end about unexplained “things that happened” in the cottages evokes more confusion than magic. But the story itself, laid out in greater detail in a long afterword, is of both historical and current interest, as it features four women who grew to adulthood in the first quarter of the 20th century to have professional careers, to run several businesses, and to build distinctive houses that thriftily recycled materials and decorative elements salvaged from area mansions that were being demolished during the Great Depression. There’s no need to embellish those achievements with flights of fancy. Potter offers both inside and outside glimpses of at least one cottage along with views of the gracefully posed White-presenting sisters at various ages and in period dress. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An overwrought but inspiring tale of dreamers who were also doers. (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Kirkus Reviews