Exclusive cover reveal: 'The Boy Who Lost Fairyland' by Catherynne Valente

HEA gets to reveal the cover of book four in Catherynne Valente's Fairyland series, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, coming in March (and, yep, there's romance in it!). Catherynne joins us to explore how "fairy tales are the CSI of the ancient, and not-so-ancient, world." (To see a larger version of the cover, click on the blue arrow in the lower right corner of the image.)

Catherynne: Fairy tales and happy endings go together like tigers and stripes. No matter what horrors have taken place over the course of the tale — witches eating children, dancing in red-hot shoes, parents abandoning their offspring — the heroine must win out in the end. A fairy tale is defined by its happy ending. We don't turn to Grimm to see Hansel and Gretel made into a pie or Sleeping Beauty snooze into the Internet Age.

And as a culture, we associate both fairy tales and happy endings with a certain kind of sweet, tenderhearted dishonesty. Fairy tales aren't real, we insist. They aren't serious. They aren't gritty, dark, unflinching portraits of broken people in a corrupt world, and therefore can't be as true as other, more realistic stories. (Spoiler: They are all those things. Fairy tales are the CSI of the ancient, and not-so-ancient, world.) And they end happily, for the most part. We all know life doesn't work that way. Fairy tale is now a word that means a nice lie told to children.

But here's the thing about happy endings and fairy tales: They can be true, and brave, and hard-won. We dismiss Cinderella as a goofy romance about shoes and pretty dresses and forget the abuse, neglect, grief, hunger and mutilation. But don't we want a happy ending for a girl whose mother is dead, who has no one to care whether she lives or dies, who only longs for something other than hatred and brutally hard work in her life? Don't we yearn for that happy ending, work for it along with her and need to believe that sometimes, in real life, we, too, can fit some shoe, somewhere?

This is why we keep telling fairy stories and romances and why we keep digging happy endings out of a bonfire of spinning wheels. Why we, as writers, keep bending our books toward them even when we see things turning out not so well all around us. Because we know two things about happy endings. The first is: There's no such thing as an ending. Stories, in the real world, always go on far longer than the wedding or the birth of a child or the making of a fortune. Where a story begins and ends is the whole of the tale. If I were to tell you about the birth of a new prince and his happy childhood, ending with his departing for college abroad with his two best friends, you wouldn't recognize Hamlet. Nothing ever ends, not really.

The second is this: The thousand varied happy endings of literature are a roadmap so that we can find our way to our own private, brave, true, hard-won, sometimes brief, but eventually returning, happiness — happiness without an ending.

Here's the blurb about The Boy Who Lost Fairyland:

When a young troll named Hawthorn is stolen from Fairyland by the Golden Wind, he becomes a changeling – a human boy -- in the strange city of Chicago, a place no less bizarre and magical than Fairyland when seen through trollish eyes. Left with a human family, Hawthorn struggles with his troll nature and his changeling fate. But when he turns twelve, he stumbles upon a way back home, to a Fairyland much changed from the one he remembers. Hawthorn finds himself at the center of a changeling revolution--until he comes face to face with a beautiful young Scientiste with very big, very red assistant.

Time magazine has praised Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books as "one of the most extraordinary works of fantasy, for adults or children, published so far this century." In this fourth installment of her saga, Valente 's wisdom and wit will charm readers of all ages.

Find out more about Catherynne and her books at www.catherynnemvalente.com.