Ella said after Alice’s rescue that he was just a fan using Alice to try to see Althea, but Alice wondered for a few years if the man was actually her unknown father. When Alice was six, a redhaired man in a Blue Buick briefly kidnapped her, claiming he was taking her to see her grandmother. Bad luck seemed to chase Ella and Alice to new landing sites, where they settled hesitantly until the next bout of misfortune uprooted them again. Alice is 17 as the story opens, and she explains her backstory: She and Ella lived largely “like vagrants, staying with friends till our welcome wore though at the elbows, perching in precarious places, then moving on” (3). Ella grew up to become the mother of protagonist Alice. But when Alices grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns.
After her publication, Althea raised her daughter, Ella, in a reclusive estate called the Hazel Wood. The story opens with a snippet of a 1987 Vanity Fair article about the main character’s grandmother, Althea Proserpine, an author whose single published book earned her “an odd kind of fame” (1).
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