“Let me put it this way: when your mom cooks, she doesn’t have to close the doors to make sure the Gingerbread Men don’t run outside.”

Junior high is tough enough, even when your family is ordinary. And Julie Marchen’s family is anything but ordinary: her brother is a talking cat, her grandmother is a bona fide witch, and her mother is Rapunzel.

Yep, that Rapunzel - long hair, tower, prince… 500 years ago, Rapunzel escaped the fairy tale with her fellow storybook characters to live incognito in our world. But now Julie’s world, our world, is about to change - the fairy tale wants its characters back.

Sarah Beth Durst grew up in Northboro, MA, a town in central Massachusetts which (she claims) was temporarily transformed into a fairy tale kingdom for several days in 1986. These events later inspired her novel, Into the Wild, as well as her paralyzing fear of glass footwear.

At age 10, she decided she wanted to become a writer. Her first story was a cross between the Wizard of Oz and G.I. Joe. With lions. She wrote a lot more after that without lions, including a stageplay for her senior thesis at Princeton University. Not a single lion in that. But there were dragons. Yes, in a stageplay.

She then spent a year living and writing in Cambridge, England, until the walls of her flat molded from all the rain and she decided to move back to the Northeast. Sarah currently lives in Stony Brook, NY, with her husband, their daughter, and their cat Perni, whose name was Copernicus until they discovered that he was a girl cat.