(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored. - Alice Hoffman

I loved magic from the start, beginning with the stories my Russian grandmother told me. If "magic" was in the title of a book, I was bound to find it. In the world of fairy tales, the amazing is recounted in a matter-of fact tone, with the practical and the magical living side by side. One day there is a knock at the door, or a rose that blooms through the winter, or a spindle that must be avoided at all costs. It was the melding of the magical and the everyday that was most affecting to me as a reader, for the world I lived in seemed much the same. People you loved could disappear, through death or divorce; they could turn into heroes or beasts. My personal experience and my childhood reading left me longing for a world in which anything could happen, magic or not, on an ordinary day.

I wrote to remind myself that in the darkest hour the roses still bloom, the stars still come out at night (preface)

The most she dared to wish for now was to live long enough to become a woman. (p46)