Here is a little about the book that started it all...
"Hoffman has a child’s dreamy eye, in the best possible sense. To her, the stuff grown-ups don’t see anymore looms huge and important — insects 
banging on windowpanes, thunderstorms, a chestnut tree with a door to the “otherworld.” She invents a realm where that sense of the fictive doesn’t go away, where imagination and reality bleed together. “The Story Sisters” itself is not a fairy tale. The characters in fairy tales are all good or all bad, and Hoffman’s characters are always moving back and forth, challenging our perceptions, daring us to judge them. Her sentences tremble with allegory; nothing in this novel is ever as it appears — or is it? As Elv becomes more troubled, she retreats farther into the world of Arnelle, and farther away from her sisters. Even the girls’ last name, Story, is whimsical, lending heft to Elv’s theory that they were renamed by mortal kidnappers — we mortals being so maddeningly literal. "
banging on windowpanes, thunderstorms, a chestnut tree with a door to the “otherworld.” She invents a realm where that sense of the fictive doesn’t go away, where imagination and reality bleed together. “The Story Sisters” itself is not a fairy tale. The characters in fairy tales are all good or all bad, and Hoffman’s characters are always moving back and forth, challenging our perceptions, daring us to judge them. Her sentences tremble with allegory; nothing in this novel is ever as it appears — or is it? As Elv becomes more troubled, she retreats farther into the world of Arnelle, and farther away from her sisters. Even the girls’ last name, Story, is whimsical, lending heft to Elv’s theory that they were renamed by mortal kidnappers — we mortals being so maddeningly literal. " 
New York Times Book review 2009
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