Fashioning Fairy Tales & Facts Into Historical Fiction

By Laura DeNooyer

In the throes of writing a novel, my to-be-read titles pile up. My last two books are chock full of literary allusions. The Broken Weathervane (Sept 2, 2025) is partially set in the English department of a small university, featuring an English professor and a former high school literature teacher turned grants officer. It’s only natural that classic literary quotes would be on the tip of their tongues.

I searched for applicable quotes from Charles Dickens and Jack London as well as The Scarlett Letter and Pride and Prejudice. My characters make allusions to the novels of Hemingway, Orwell, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck. But, aside from other research, the only novel I read in correlation with The Broken Weathervanewas Pride and Prejudice.

However, in writing A Hundred Magical Reasons (January 7, 2025), I read thirty-two books and a hundred-plus essays! Since the story premise hinges on the life of L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, I had to familiarize myself with his works, which included fourteen Oz novels and a plethora of other children’s books.

Additionally, I read Baum’s newspaper editorials and a hilarious column he wrote in the voice of a fictional landlady—Mrs. Bilkins—in Aberdeen, South Dakota (1891). The Annotated Wizard of Oz and forty-plusBaum Bugle periodicals rounded out my knowledge of Baum’s life, family, career, and cultural influences at the turn of the century.

To further understand L. Frank Baum, you have to know his mother-in-law, suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and her impact on him, which led me to read her biography, Born Criminal. The Annotated Anne of Green Gables gave insights into my character who hailed from Prince Edward Island around the same time Anne of Green Gables was published (1908).

Since my protagonist is a young girl who loves reading, I had to brush up on my fairy tales and popular children’s literature in the early 1900s—anything she would have been familiar with. So, I indulged myself in a second childhood while reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and dozens of original fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson, George McDonald, Oscar Wilde, and early American authors.

I shamelessly embraced E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle and plunged into Christian’s world in The Pilgrim’s Progress—which became a key element of my novel. Like its secular counterpart, The Wizard of Oz, it encapsulates the hero’s journey and reflects my protagonist’s ups and downs.

Since imagination plays an important role in A Hundred Magical Reasons, I savored essays on fairy tales by G. K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and relished  Leland Ryken’s Triumphs of the Imagination. Theologian, minister, and author Frederick Buechner offered additional insights and Oz analogies in his books The Magnificent Defeat and Telling the Truth.

On a completely different but necessary note, I also read The Poisoner’s Handbook—a morbid but fascinating read about the birth of forensic science. But that’s all I can say about that.

Overall, the creation of The Broken Weathervane and A Hundred Magical Reasons provided a joyful reading journey.

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