On her last day of work, Hazel encounters a volume titled Whisperwood and the River of Stars, by an American author named Peggy Andrews. Although the book is fictional, it serves as the novel’s inciting incident, underlying thematic current, and in some ways becomes the story’s “McGuffin”—a literary term used to refer to a tangible object that incites the central characters into action (normally something which the characters are searching for, such as an antidote, but sometimes something that pushes them on their journey, as is the case here). Although Peggy Andrews is a fictional character, the book’s illustrator, Pauline Baynes, was a real artist. Baynes is most famous for her work on the stories of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and lived and worked in England at the time in which this book is set (although it is not specified in the novel, it’s unlikely that Peggy and Pauline would have crossed paths; more likely, the publisher would have liaised between them knowing of Pauline’s prior accomplishments). At the end of The Secret Book of Flora Lea, Pauline Baynes donates brand-new illustrations to Whisperwood after hearing Hazel’s and Peggy’s story.

Whisperwood and the River of Stars sets the

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