“Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.” So the quote goes by American playwright Eugene O’Neill. Author H.D. Hunter uses this idea of a fairy tale obsession and a fruitless search to readers on a fantastic yet familiar journey. A Magic Door and A Lost Kingdom of Peace is the first full-length book by Hunter. A collection of ten short stories, each has unique characters and scenarios that are essentially brief tales of the bildungsroman genre. The stories combine coming-of-age, social justice, the black experience, relationships, social commentary, and fairy-tales together to create a colorful work with powerful Aesopic morals that leaves the reader looking for pages to turn. The twist is, however, that today’s world is not so “black and white” as in Aesop’s time. Each story gives realistic insight into how young adults handle the situations that vex and disturb them the most, giving the reader characters and scenarios they can identify with, and an illuminated path to walk down should they encounter any such situation in the future. Hunter draws inspiration from classic Greek texts, the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.
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