Although Franny Billingsley's works for children included only two titles by 2000, she has gained recognition as an important figure in the world of juvenile fantasy. With Well Wished and The Folk Keeper Billingsley has established a solid reputation as a writer of young adult fiction; her second novel, 1999's The Folk Keeper, won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature, and was nominated for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Award in 2000. Fantasy, Billingsley told Authors and Artists for Young Adults (AAYA), is an ideal genre through which to explore abstract concepts. "The reason I write fantasy is because of issues of identity," she stated. "Identity, for example, is abstract, but in fantasy you can take a problem that exists only as a mental reality and give it a concrete form. In my books I can take the abstraction and make it real...