A beautiful and captivating dual-time story that takes you back and forth between 1910 and 2008.

Maria is an orphan in 1910 who, with her tiny hands has become an excellent seamstress.  She and her friend Nora are soon whisked away to Buckingham Palace to work as seamstresses. Maria catches the eye of the young Prince of Wales and finds herself in a delicate situation.  Not wanting a royal scandal, Maria is taken away to a mental institution.  The staff at the mental institution not only take her baby and her sanity, but Maria still has her story that she preserves in a quilt.

In 2008, Caroline has just lost her boyfriend and her job.  She is also trying to take care of her mother who has dementia.   Caroline is helping her mother clean out her house when she comes across a beautiful and unique quilt.  Caroline needs something to fill her time, so she decides to try and figure out the history behind it. 

Maria and Caroline's story are both enthralling and  tragic.  I found the book more and more addicting as their stories begin to intersect and Caroline becomes closer to finding the mystery behind the quilt.  Artfully woven, Liz Trenow brings us back and forth between Maria's story and Caroline's.  Although we really only get to meet Maria through a series of transcribed cassette tape recordings when she is an older woman, her story is enchanting and I wanted nothing more than the truth to be unraveled.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review. 

A retelling of Sleeping Beauty, although not at all as a fairy tale. 

As a humble farmer's daughter, Elise awakes one morning after surviving a bout of the pox to find most of her family dead, or nearly so.  Attempting to fulfill her dreams and her mother's dying wish, Elise makes her way from the country side to the city in order to find a place at the castle where her mother once served.  Taken in by her aunt, who readies her to serve at the castle, Elise easily makes her way up through the ranks until she becomes Queen Lenore's personal attendant.  Elise's intelligent and caring manner allows her to be friendly with the Queen and the King's elderly and devious aunt Millicent.  We follow Elise as she recounts her story through her own love and loss as well as her fierce determination and loyalty to the Queen and her only daughter, Rose. 

Told from the point of view of Elise as an older woman, who is now telling the tale to her granddaughter, we get to hear the story through a mature lens. This story is told as more of a piece of historical fiction in a series of events that are not at all wrapped up in fantasy, but that could have really happened; then brandished with the element of time, have made their way into the elaborate fairy tale as we know it today.  I really enjoyed reading all of the intricate details that I know of the fairy tale woven into seemingly normal events.  It was easy to imagine how the events that Elise accounts could be turned into the fairy tale as we know it.  I really enjoyed reading this tale and was caught up in Elise's world.  I wish Elizabeth Blackwell would write this as a series of re-tellings of fairy tales, but I'm not sure I'm that lucky.

Thank you to Elizabeth Blackwell and the Goodread's First Reads program for providing me with a free advanced reading copy of this book.