If the Forest Had a Fairy Tale

Summer Reed has spent two years learning how to survive a death everyone says she caused.

Asher Hale was the boy she loved for fourteen years — the boy who spoke to fish, dove shipwrecks a hundred and fifty feet down, and died in the ocean off Cape Mercy before he could say the words he had come home to tell her. Grief came for Summer after him: post-traumatic stress, a bipolar diagnosis, a psychiatric ward, and a town that had already decided her guilt.

Then Rowan Mercer walked back into Greyhaven. Asher's oldest friend carried the same blame and the same grief, and he had every reason to hate her. Instead, he stayed.

At Cascadia University, among a fractured dive club, a professor who cannot face the water, a mother guarding her daughter's mornings, and a friend who refuses to leave, Summer begins the dangerous work of wanting a future. She writes a fairy tale about a girl who loved the ocean and a boy who belonged to the forest, searching its pages for an ending she cannot yet live.

Told through four alternating voices — Summer, Rowan, her mother Claire, and her friend Lena — If the Forest Had a Fairy Tale is an unflinching novel about grief and mental illness, the families grief builds and breaks, and first love in the long shadow of loss. It asks the hardest question of all: after the worst day of your life, are you allowed to keep going?

Content Note: This novel depicts grief, post-traumatic stress, bipolar disorder, dissociation, suicidal ideation, psychiatric hospitalization, and an accidental death by drowning.