In this memoir of a childhood summer filled with magic, actress Coyne experiences seemingly real-life encounters with a fairy princess and comes to believe in a whole secret world of remarkable creatures. The June that she is five, Coyne accompanies her family to their summer cottage on Lake of the Woods in Canada, where their neighbors are the elderly Moir couple. Told by her father that an abandoned cottage had once been inhabited by elves, Coyne decides to beautify the cottage to encourage the little creatures to return. "I went back to the fireplace and knelt down to look inside...I could almost hear the hum of busy elfish lives. So I started leaving little gifts there for the elves: handfuls of wild strawberries, a daisy chain." Days later, she finds the first of a series of letters addressed to her by the spunky Nootsie Tah, a fairy princess who shares the story of her enchanting life with the little girl. ("It irks me, Susan, it irks me to tears that whatever animal I try to be I turn out to be a cat. Saturday I turned into a Maltese kitten. I was beautiful," reads an early letter.) While not much of consequence transpires in the letters from Nootsie (which were penned by the kind Mr. Moir) or in the intervening pages, the young Coyne revels in her own extraordinary experiences and learns much about friendship, imagination and love. Coyne's memoir is a tribute to the beauty and innocence of childhood, where nothing is too strange or fantastic to come true. Heartwarming and charming, if a little treacly, this fiction-like reminiscence may delight children and adults alike.
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From Booklist
In 1963, five-year-old Susan Coyne and her family went to their summer cottage near Lake of the Woods in Ontario. It was next door to Mr and Mrs. Moir, who were in their 70s. In the hedge between the two cottages was an old stone fireplace, the last remnant of Uncle Joe's house for bachelor elves, according to Susan's father. So Susan begins to leave little gifts for the fairies there, and--lo!--a fairy princess begins to leave notes for her in return. For all of that summer, Susan finds fairy letters--funny, silly, self-important, and full of fairy lore from sources such as Keats and Shakespeare. She gets people to read the letters to her and dictates letters back. Readers will catch on pretty quickly who's behind the fairy letters, but their gossamer charm and the wise kindness of an old scholar to a very small girl glows in these pages like burnished gold. GraceAnne DeCandido
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