Tom Argent had once loved fairy tales. When he was very…

““Tom Argent had once loved fairy tales. When he was very young, he had loved to read about princes, and kings, and queens, and fairies, and goblins, and magic. He even liked to pretend that he was the son of a fairy queen, or a pirate king, who had been adopted by humans, and one day would claim his kingdom. His parents had grown concerned at this. They had never hidden the fact that Tom was adopted, and they knew that all children liked to pretend. But Tom's imagination was especially vivid. He loved his parents very much, but they were afraid that this daydreaming might lead him to reject them one day. And so, they had both gone out of their way to discourage his love of fairy tales. Whenever they saw him with his books, they would tell him: 'Stories aren't real. Magic is just an illusion. Fairies don't exist, Tom. Only trust what you can see.' Then, on his seventh birthday, they had given Tom a camera, and the books of fairy tales had vanished swiftly and silently overnight, to be replaced by magazines devoted to different types of lens, in which the young Tom Argent had found another kind of magic. But looking at these images of the mysterious girl, he felt as if he had returned to the world of those long-ago storybooks, and it felt both exciting and wonderful, and deeply, darkly dangerous.””

— Joanne Harris