Alice Hoffman writes in the genre of the romantic mystery novel. However, her writing often transcends any specific genre, spilling over into the thriller category. She has followed a long line of dreamers: having started from the traditional fairy tales such as Mary Poppins, she graduated to J. D. Salinger and Emily Bronte, each of whom blends the dream world of fiction with a gritty realism that captured the often catastrophic marrow of the social structure of each's time. A Catcher in the Rye and Wuthering Heights remain among her alltime favorites. In fact, Wuthering Heights inspired one of her novels, Here on Earth, which was later adapted into a motion picture.

Fairy tales were popular in part because they were deeply entrenched in the oral tradition of story telling. Passed from generation to generation, they likely altered in tone and substance many times before they...