Annie Barber writes stories for readers who notice everything.
This series began out loud, in the dark, out of necessity. There was a newborn who would not sleep, and on the other side of her an older child full of questions. With a baby in one arm and a small interrogator on the other, she started inventing two sisters who found a hidden realm in the woods, a piece at a time, night after night, because the alternative was silence, and nobody in that room wanted silence.
Montana came through her husband’s family, whose summers at Ashley Lake stretch back generations. It is a real lake in Flathead County, with real osprey diving for trout, real nutcrackers arguing in the treetops, and wild huckleberries that stain your fingers purple for days. One summer she began leaving notes and small treasures along the shore, signed by a pair of fairy sisters who lived on the island. The notes were never really about fairies. They were an instruction: look closer. Be quiet enough to notice. Something is happening at the edge of the dock and it is not going to announce itself.
For the parts of you that feel too much. They are the best of you. Never apologize for them.
These books are for every child who has stood at the edge of a lake at dusk, or pressed an ear to the ground, and felt, for just a moment, that the world was breathing back. And they are for the adults reading over their shoulders: every parent split among a dozen roles, every teacher who carries children’s grief home, every eldest daughter who learned to read a room before she learned to read.
