Summary

The novel is narrated in third-person past with a focalization on the main character, Miranda Browne. In “Ever After,” the narrator says that afterwards (though we do not yet know after what), Miranda always tried to remember how something special had happened to her, but the memory was like a lost dream. She would stare at her dollhouse, but the memory would never come to her.

In Chapter One, Miranda and her parents drove from New York to their new house in Garnet, Massachusetts. Her parents sang the whole way there. Her mother, Helen, was a doctor, and her father, Philip, was a city college history professor. Helen wanted to open her own practice in Garnet so that she could leave the big hospital, and her father wanted to quit teaching because he had recently suffered a heart attack because of...