North of Ordinary: Short Stories That Live in the Quiet Between Things

A Midwestern atmospheric literary fiction collection rooted in place, season, and complicated lives

Some towns don’t change. They just learn how to hide it better.
In the northern Midwest, ordinary lives bend quietly, until they don’t.

In the quiet towns and backroads of the northern Midwest, nothing stays buried forever.

Set against apple orchards, corn mazes, gravel roads, and wind-cut fields, North of Ordinary is a literary short story collection that traces the

Blending contemporary literary fiction with the textures of rural America, this collection captures the quiet drama of people caught between obligation and desire, memory and reinvention. Each story is grounded in Midwestern landscapes—where the air carries cider, dust, and something unsaid—and where even the smallest decision can echo.

Perfect for readers who love:

character-driven fiction and emotionally resonant storytelling
small town drama and layered relationships
atmospheric literary fiction with a strong sense of place
coming-of-age themes, family tension, and quiet unravelings
the work of Elizabeth Strout, Annie Proulx, and Raymond Carver

North of Ordinary is a collection about what lingers—
in towns that remember,
in families that fracture and hold,
and in the long, quiet moment before a life changes course.

Thrillers of survival. Dark fairytales of resilience.

Welcome. I’m Angela Ellen Grey — author, artist, and a believer in the kind of stories that make you feel your pulse.

I write for the girls who stayed awake.
For the ones who walked home alone.
For the dreamers who step through the wrong doorway and discover they’re stronger than anyone expected.

Every story is a doorway.
Some we hesitate to open.
Some we run through screaming.
Some are carved inside us —
until we become the threshold.

🔪 The Dakota Killer Thrillers

Everything she survived made her dangerous.
The kind of girl who lives through one killer doesn’t run from the next.

Meet Laci O’Neil — survivor, sister, reluctant fighter. She doesn’t go looking for trouble…, but in the Dakotas, trouble finds girls like her. Each book uncovers a new predator hiding behind the quiet of small towns and wide-open land. Different killers. Same silence. Laci refuses to look away.

If you love:

Missing girls who get found because someone refuses to stop searching
Rural noir with teeth
Survivors who aren’t done fighting

This is your next obsession.

📚 Start with: Long Since Buried
➡️ Continue the hunt in Since You’ve Been Gone
🩸 Forthcoming: Ghosted Buried Gone + Long Since Drowned

🌙 The Dreamcatcher Dark Fantasy Series

What if your nightmares were looking back?

Dash never meant to touch the dreamcatcher her grandmother made — but once she falls into Baumwelt, a dark, enchanted world stitched from fear and forgotten tales, nothing will ever be safe again.
Not in the dreams.
Not in the waking.

Because some dreams protect you.
Others hunt you.

If you crave:

Creepy forests and whispered warnings
Indigenous-inspired magic realism
Fairytales with bite

Let me show you the stairway through the clouds.

📚 Begin with: Dreamcatcher: A Hidden World Fairy Tale Fantasy

✨ Why I Write These Stories

My worlds are shaped by the land — the plains, the rivers, the woods that hold secrets older than we are, by the whispers of the ancestors. By the too-real fears we try to outgrow, by the ordinary girls who choose to fight back anyway.

Whether the monster is a man
or a shadow made of teeth —
My characters rise.

Because survival isn’t just making it out alive.
It’s refusing to stay silent afterward.

🔗 Join the Journey

Be the first to know when the next body is found —
or the next portal opens.

📬 Join my newsletter for exclusive bonus stories, case files, and dream-lore.
🎤 Book clubs and libraries — I’d love to visit.

Thanks for stepping into the dark with me.
Let’s leave the lights off a little longer. 🌑✨

The Language of Survival: On Mental Illness, Resilience, and First Love

I’ve always believed that the most courageous stories are not about rescue, but about return—how we come back to ourselves after the mind has turned against us. When I write about mental illness, I don’t write from a distance. I write from the thin edge of it—from the quiet hours where thought unravels and the only lifeline is language. Each of my novels—Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak—was born out of that liminal space between fear and faith, between survival and surrender.

These books aren’t companions by chronology, but by spirit. Each follows a young woman whose inner world threatens to eclipse the outer one, and each discovers that love—whether romantic, platonic, or self-forged—is the most powerful form of recovery we have.

1. The Mind as Haunted House: Secret Whispers

When I wrote Secret Whispers, I began with an image: a house stitched together by secrets, its silence louder than any scream. Inside it lives Adria—a painter, sister, caretaker, and reluctant witness to her own unraveling.

Schizophrenia shadows her family line, coiling like a whispered curse. Her brother’s breakdown has already split the household in half. Her mother holds everything together with brittle faith. And Adria, caught between caretaking and collapse, begins to hear the same whispers that once took him away.

I wanted to write honestly about what it means to live with a mind you can’t fully trust—the terror of not knowing whether what you see is symptom or sight. But I also wanted to write about love: the improbable, incandescent kind that dares to root itself in fractured soil.

In Secret Whispers, love doesn’t save Adria. It steadies her. The boy who sees her—awkward, hopeful, honest—doesn’t fix her illness; he becomes a mirror in which she can see more than diagnosis. Their love flickers like a candle in a draft, fragile yet real, proof that connection is possible even when perception splinters.

Adria’s resilience isn’t loud. It’s made of small gestures: washing a brush, opening a window, whispering not today when the shadows come. Recovery, I learned while writing her, is not a staircase but a spiral—you circle the same fears until you finally face them without flinching.

2. Déjà Vu: The Loops of the Bipolar Mind

If Secret Whispers was about hearing too much, Déjà Vu was about feeling too much—about living inside a mind where memory and mania blur.

Ivy Lancaster is eighteen, brilliant, impulsive, and newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She experiences life in echoes: every stranger’s face feels familiar, every nightmare seems rehearsed, every choice loops back like a record caught on its scratch.

The first time I wrote Ivy walking through the parking lot at dawn, barefoot and disoriented, I felt the pulse of the entire novel—this young woman spinning in the orbit of her own brain, terrified of herself yet desperate to be believed.

Déjà Vu is not just a psychological thriller; it’s an emotional x-ray of bipolarity. Mania is painted not as glamour but as velocity—the thrill that burns. Depression is written not as stillness but as suffocation. Yet in between, there’s the quiet miracle of awareness.

And there is love. Love arrives in Ivy’s world not as romance, but as recognition: people who refuse to define her by her disorder, who remind her that she exists beyond chemical imbalance. Love, in this book, is accountability—the friend who says take your meds, the parent who whispers you are more than your mind, the stranger who looks her in the eye when she feels invisible.

Resilience here is not recovery in the clinical sense. It’s survival as rebellion. It’s Ivy saying, I may live inside loops, but I can still choose where to step next.

When readers tell me Déjà Vu helped them feel seen—that it mirrored their manic spirals or the hollow aftermath—I’m reminded why I write these stories. To dismantle stigma. To remind us that living with mental illness is not a flaw in character, but a feat of endurance.

3. Of Laughter & Heartbreak: OCD and the Art of Staying

By the time I wrote Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I wanted to explore a different texture of the mind: the obsessive, ritualized patterns of control that masquerade as safety.

Stevie Matthews is almost sixteen. Her thoughts arrive like barbed wire; her rituals multiply like vines. When the summer’s order collapses, she’s hospitalized—a space she never asked for, but where, for the first time, she meets others who understand the language of compulsion.

OCD, for Stevie, is both prison and prayer. Her rituals aren’t about superstition; they’re about trying to keep the world from shattering. I wrote her story as both confession and communion—a letter to anyone who’s ever mistaken coping for control.

Behind those locked doors, Stevie meets her mirror selves: the anxious boy who collects facts like talismans, the quiet girl who hides notes to her future self, the nurse who knows that healing isn’t linear. Together they build something like family—a map stitched from shared fragments of hope.

This novel, like the others, carries the pulse of first love—not in grand gestures, but in small acts of belief. The hand that steadies hers during a panic spiral. The smile that says you are not too much. The love that grows not in spite of illness, but within it. Because love, at its truest, doesn’t demand wholeness—it meets you in the fragments and stays.

4. The Quiet Revolution of Survival

Each of these novels began with illness, but each ends with something larger: a reclamation of humanity.

In Secret Whispers, Adria learns that her art can hold what her mind cannot.
In Déjà Vu, Ivy redefines truth beyond the lens of mania.
In Of Laughter & Heartbreak, Stevie learns that control is not safety, and surrender is not defeat.

Together, they form a kind of triptych about resilience—the quiet kind that never makes headlines. They remind me that mental illness and first love often share the same vocabulary: vulnerability, risk, surrender, trust. Both require standing on the edge of the unknown and saying yes anyway.

To live with a brain that misfires is to live constantly between worlds—the real and the imagined, the lucid and the lost. Yet within that space, there’s beauty. There’s empathy. There’s art.

These are not stories about being cured. They’re stories about being human.

5. Why I Keep Writing

Sometimes readers ask why I return, again and again, to characters who struggle with their minds. My answer is simple: because I know what it means to stay.

Because the world still whispers that mental illness is weakness.
Because the stories that saved me were the ones that refused to flinch.
Because the young readers who see themselves in Adria, Ivy, and Stevie deserve to know they are not broken—they are becoming.

Writing these books has taught me that resilience isn’t the absence of relapse; it’s the decision to keep loving life anyway. It’s the courage to reach for connection even when your hands shake. It’s the soft defiance of building hope out of symptoms.

And maybe, at the center of it all, it’s first love—the thing that reminds us we’re still capable of wonder.

When I look back on Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I see not a trilogy of illness, but a mosaic of endurance. Each girl walks through her own labyrinth and emerges carrying the same small flame: belief.

Belief that we are more than diagnosis.
Belief that love is still possible in the dark.
Belief that the quiet work of staying—of waking up again, and again—is itself a form of grace.

If these stories have a single message, it’s this:
Even when the mind fractures, the heart remembers how to reach for light.

Thresholds Between Worlds: Writing the Dreaming Mind

Photo by Karyme Franu00e7a on Pexels.com

There are nights when the mind becomes a borderland—not waking, not sleeping, but something tender and trembling between. That’s where my stories live. When I write, I’m less interested in plot than in passage—the subtle moment when reality begins to shimmer and something unseen breathes through. It’s the hum before a dream takes shape, the hush in a library where imagination crosses the threshold.

My novels Dreamcatcher, Ink & Ivy, and Whimsy and Bliss were each born from that in-between space: where dream logic and daylight ache overlap, where imagination is both refuge and revelation. I’ve come to think of them not as separate stories, but as three rooms in the same house—the House of the Dreaming Mind.

1. The Doorway in the Dark

The idea for Dreamcatcher began with an image: a girl climbing through a fire-escape window, brushing against her grandmother’s dreamcatcher, and falling into another world. For Dash, my protagonist, the dream realm of Baumwelt is not a fantasy world in the traditional sense—it’s a reflection of her inner life. Every creature she meets, every landscape she crosses, echoes her memories, fears, and ancestral lineage. The world outside her window dissolves, but what replaces it is not pure invention—it’s memory rearranged by sleep.

Dreams are the language of the unconscious, but they are also archives of ancestry. In Dakota tradition, dreams carry instruction; they are bridges to spirit, not mere illusion. Writing Dreamcatcher, I wanted to honor that worldview—to let dream be teacher, not escape.

The dreaming mind, after all, has its own geography. It’s where past and present fold into each other, where the living and the dead keep company. Dash’s journey through Baumwelt is really a journey into inheritance—into how memory, myth, and trauma shape the self. When she wakes, nothing around her has changed, but she has. That’s what every good story does—it sends you somewhere so that you can return with new eyes.

2. Ink as Spellwork

If Dreamcatcher is the dream entered through sleep, Ink & Ivy is the dream entered through creation. Marisol, the girl who runs a hidden bookshop, learns that the stories she writes can alter reality. What she pens becomes what she lives; language itself becomes a portal. But her gift carries risk: every act of creation has a cost. Words can heal, but they can also harm.

In that sense, Ink & Ivy is about authorship as alchemy—the idea that writing is both spell and surrender. As writers, we are always crossing thresholds between imagined and real. We live half in the world and half in language. The line between the two blurs until even we can’t tell which is which. When Marisol writes, she’s not escaping grief; she’s giving it shape. The ink becomes her ritual of remembrance.

Writing, too, is a dream you enter deliberately. When I’m deep in it, time dissolves, sound thickens, and the body becomes peripheral. That liminal state—the creative trance—is the same consciousness that dreams speak from. It’s what poets call flow and mystics call vision. I’ve come to believe that all art is a form of lucid dreaming: we are awake, but we allow the dream to guide our hand.

3. Between Wonder and Loss

Then there is Whimsy and Bliss—a story set not in another world, but in the precise moment before girlhood fades into adulthood. Abigail Whimsy is the dreamer; Lainey Bliss is the realist. Together, they chase “thin places,” secret corners of their lakeside town where the fabric between worlds wears thin. Their summer map becomes a pilgrimage of goodbye—to childhood, to friendship, to the certainty that magic is only for the young.

In Whimsy and Bliss, the dreaming mind is not only nocturnal—it’s emotional. The dream here is nostalgia: the ache for what can’t be returned to, the shimmering almost-memory of who we were. When Whimsy and Bliss explore abandoned libraries and climb water towers under moonlight, they’re searching for wonder before it vanishes. They are practicing a kind of everyday mysticism—the belief that the ordinary world is already enchanted, if only we pay attention.

This, to me, is the heart of the dreaming mind: it notices what others overlook. It lives in metaphor, in symbol, in atmosphere. It insists that even grief has its own radiance.

4. Dream as Bridge, Not Escape

People sometimes ask why I write “fantasy.” I never quite know how to answer, because my worlds are not so much invented as revealed. Fantasy, for me, is not an exit door—it’s an entrance. Dreaming and writing share a purpose: they make the invisible visible. They bridge what logic can’t. When I write about portals, I don’t mean only magical doors. I mean threshold moments: the second before grief hits, the silence after someone says I love you, the pause between inhale and exhale. These are the real portals, the moments where transformation begins.

The dreaming mind knows this. It’s always translating feeling into image: a locked door becomes fear; a rising tide becomes memory; a missing key becomes forgiveness waiting to happen.

In Dreamcatcher, Baumwelt is Dash’s subconscious given form. In Ink & Ivy, imagination becomes tangible, able to wound or heal. In Whimsy and Bliss, dream takes the shape of longing. Each story moves through a different register of the same truth: that what we imagine is not separate from who we are.

Fantasy still matters because it reminds us that the world is layered. Beneath the surface of the ordinary lies a pulse of mystery, waiting to be remembered.

5. The Craft of Crossing

Writing the dreaming mind requires a particular discipline of attention. It’s not about inventing strange worlds, but about listening for what already hums beneath language.

I’ve learned to approach each story like a lucid dreamer: half-awake, observant, unafraid. When a sentence feels too rational, I let it unravel. When logic tries to take over, I ask what image might speak instead.

A novel like Dreamcatcher grows through atmosphere before plot; it must be dreamed onto the page. Ink & Ivy demands reverence for language itself—every word carries spell-weight. Whimsy and Bliss thrives on emotional resonance—the threshold between childhood and adulthood is its own kind of magic realism.

To write the dreaming mind, one must accept unknowing. The story reveals itself only as you move through it, like a dream that solidifies upon waking. You can’t outline it entirely; you can only walk with it.

6. Waking Gently

What I love most about dream-based writing is how it teaches you to wake differently. When you step out of a story like Dreamcatcher or Ink & Ivy, you don’t just return to life—you return to it changed. Readers often tell me they see their own dreams differently after finishing these books. That is the greatest compliment I could receive. It means the stories have done their work: not to distract, but to awaken.

The dreaming mind is not a place we visit only at night. It’s a consciousness we carry—a sensitivity to meaning, pattern, and possibility. It’s the part of us that still believes rivers can whisper, that trees remember, that words are alive.

Writing through that lens keeps me tethered to awe. And awe, I think, is a form of prayer.

7. The Threshold Itself

I return often to that fire-escape window from Dreamcatcher. The girl climbing through it. The touch of feathers, the shift of air. The dreamcatcher trembling like a heartbeat.

That moment—between step and fall, between real and imagined—is the space I write from. It’s the threshold itself that matters, not what lies on either side.

Because the dreaming mind isn’t about choosing one world over another. It’s about learning to live in both at once. To walk through daylight with a trace of starlight still on your skin. To carry the dream with you, awake.

Every story I’ve written is, in its own way, a map back to that place.

Dreamcatcher taught me to honor ancestral dream as truth.
Ink & Ivy taught me that language is alive.
Whimsy and Bliss taught me that growing up doesn’t mean losing wonder.

All three remind me that imagination is not an indulgence—it’s a responsibility.

The dreaming mind keeps us human. It holds the world together, one dream, one story, one word at a time.

The Quiet Work of Staying: Healing in Fragments

Before I learned how to write, I learned how to stay. Not the cinematic kind of staying—the triumphant recovery arc, the sudden sunrise after years of darkness—but the quiet, ordinary kind. The kind that happens in fragments: brushing your teeth after days of forgetting due to deep depression, answering one text message, writing a single word. The kind of staying that doesn’t look heroic, but is.

For a long time, I thought healing would feel like a song. Now I know it’s more like static—broken, uneven, but still carrying sound.

Both The Alphabet of Almosts and Some Species of Outsider-ness were born from that static—from the ache of trying to make coherence out of chaos, from the question that threads through all mental-health narratives: how do you keep living when the story doesn’t make sense anymore?

1. Fragments as Language

When I began writing The Alphabet of Almosts, I didn’t set out to create a story about illness. I set out to alphabetize survival—to give shape to the words that hovered between diagnosis and hope.

The book unfolds through small vignettes, each one a lettered fragment—A for Admission, B for Breakthrough, C for Control—and together they build something resembling a life. I was living in that in-between place: between recovery and relapse, clarity and confusion. Each fragment became a way of saying, I’m still here, even if I can’t say it all at once.

There’s something deeply honest about fragments. They don’t pretend to be whole. They allow contradiction, misstep, mess. They remind us that language, like healing, doesn’t have to be linear to be true.

For me, fragmentary writing became both mirror and medicine. When the mind fractures, linearity can feel dishonest. The world arrives in flashes—images, memories, unfinished thoughts. Writing in fragments wasn’t an aesthetic choice; it was survival. It was how I could stay.

2. The Work of Staying

Staying is not glamorous. It doesn’t get book deals or film adaptations. It doesn’t even feel like progress most days. Staying is brushing your hair. It’s making a list you may never finish. It’s finding small reasons not to disappear.

In Some Species of Outsider-ness, I wanted to explore that kind of endurance through two characters—Piper and Slater—whose internal battles are as invisible as they are immense. Piper lives with bipolar disorder, Slater with the lingering paralysis of Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Both are marked by difference in a world that worships sameness.

Their story begins not with love, but with survival: two teens learning that belonging doesn’t mean being fixed, but being seen. The novel’s title comes from the idea that being an outsider is not a condition to be cured—it’s a species to be studied, honored, understood.

The quiet work of staying runs through both their lives. For Piper, it’s managing the cycle of mania and depression without letting either define her. For Slater, it’s learning to move again—physically, emotionally, relationally—after trauma. Neither of them is “better” by the end. But they are still here. And sometimes that’s enough.

Staying is not stagnation; it’s an act of devotion. It’s choosing to keep breathing even when the air feels heavy. It’s sitting in your own skin, even when it doesn’t feel like home.

3. Healing in Fragments

The culture of wellness often sells us a singular image of healing: bright mornings, clear journaling pages, the triumphant “after.” But true healing—especially after mental illness, grief, or trauma—is far less symmetrical.

Healing happens in fragments. In partial sentences. In moments you forget to count as progress: the laugh you didn’t expect, the walk you took without dread, the meal you actually tasted.

In The Alphabet of Almosts, the narrator describes healing as “collecting the scattered glass of myself and learning not to bleed every time I touch it.” I think of that often. Healing is not about gluing the shards back together into what once was; it’s about learning to live among them, to see beauty even in the breakage.

The Japanese art of kintsugi—mending broken pottery with gold—has become almost cliché in self-help spaces, but there’s a reason it endures. It acknowledges fracture as part of the story. The break becomes the illumination.

That’s what I wanted for Some Species of Outsider-ness too: a kind of emotional kintsugi, where characters mend not by erasing their scars but by tracing them in gold.

4. The Myth of Wholeness

Wholeness is overrated. I don’t mean that cynically. I mean that wholeness, as it’s often sold to us, is a myth that keeps us ashamed of our incompleteness. It suggests there’s an endpoint to becoming human. But what if our task isn’t to be whole, but to be honest?

Fragments allow for honesty. They let contradiction breathe. You can be healing and hurting, hopeful and hopeless, all at once. You can love your life and still want to leave it some days. You can laugh and cry within the same minute, and both are true.

When readers tell me they saw themselves in The Alphabet of Almosts, it’s rarely because they relate to every word. It’s because they recognized a single line that felt like their own breath. That’s the gift of fragmentation—it leaves room for others to enter.

And maybe that’s what healing really is: not the restoration of self, but the reconnection to others. To community. To language. To the small rituals that keep us tethered to the living.

5. What the Outsiders Teach Us

The title Some Species of Outsider-ness came to me during a sleepless night. I was thinking about how often we label difference as deficiency. How quick the world is to exile those whose rhythms don’t match its pace.

But outsiders—those who live at the edge of ordinary—often see what others cannot. They notice the fissures, the unspoken rules, the small violences of normalcy. They remind us that empathy is not a theory but a practice.

Piper and Slater’s story is, in a sense, a love letter to outsiders: to those who feel too much, too loud, too strange. It’s also a call to stay—to resist disappearance. Their survival is not cinematic. It’s quiet. But quiet doesn’t mean small.

The quiet work of staying is the foundation of every great act of love. Because staying—whether in a body, a relationship, or the world itself—requires belief in something beyond the immediate pain. It’s faith in tomorrow’s breath.

6. The Shape of Hope

Both books taught me that hope doesn’t always look like light. Sometimes it looks like a shadow. Sometimes it’s the pause between two heartbeats, the whisper between words. Hope, for me, is found in the act of making: writing, painting, collaging. In taking fragments and saying, You still matter. In creating beauty that refuses to be perfect.

When I wrote The Alphabet of Almosts, I kept a note above my desk that said, Stay in the room. That was my whole goal—not to write a masterpiece, not to heal overnight, but simply to stay. To stay long enough to turn a feeling into a line, a line into a page, a page into something that could keep another person company in their own darkness.

Art doesn’t fix us. It doesn’t erase pain. But it translates it. It gives it a place to rest. It lets others know they’re not alone in the fragments.

7. The Quiet Ending

When people ask me what The Alphabet of Almosts is “about,” I tell them it’s about learning to live inside unfinished sentences. When they ask about Some Species of Outsider-ness, I say it’s about the kind of courage that doesn’t get applause—the courage to stay.

Healing will never be tidy. It will never be final. But maybe that’s its beauty. Maybe the work of being alive is to keep stitching the fragments together, one breath at a time. There’s a line near the end of The Alphabet of Almosts that still feels like a compass to me:

“Maybe we don’t need to be whole. Maybe we just need to stay long enough to see what else becomes possible.”

Fantasy has its dragons. Romance has its declarations. But healing—real, quiet, ordinary healing—has this: the act of staying. So if you find yourself in pieces, remember this: every fragment is proof that you have not disappeared. You are still here. You are still writing. And that, too, is a kind of wholeness.

Portals Made of Language: Why Fantasy Still Matters

Before I ever believed in magic, I believed in words. Not the easy kind—abracadabra, or once upon a time—but the harder ones that carried grief and wonder in equal measure. The kind of words that didn’t promise escape, but understanding. Fantasy, for me, has never been about running away from reality; it has always been about walking toward it through a different door.

That door is language itself. Every metaphor is a threshold, every poem a small, shimmering key. And if you listen closely enough—between syllables, between breaths—you’ll hear the hinge creak open.

1. The Work of Wonder

When I began writing Dreamcatcher, I wasn’t trying to build another world. I was trying to make sense of the one I already lived in—the one that didn’t always make space for silence, for Indigenous belief, for the shimmer between dream and waking. Baumwelt, the world my protagonist Dash steps into through her grandmother’s dreamcatcher, grew from the ache of that absence.

In the beginning, I thought Baumwelt was a fantasy realm. But the longer I wrote, the more I realized: it was a reflection. Every root in that world grew from real soil—the Dakota stories, the wind through Minnesota pines, the ache of losing and finding yourself again.

Fantasy has a way of returning us to what’s most real. It asks us to look at our world through the mirror of the impossible, and in doing so, to see what we’ve overlooked. When Dash touches the dreamcatcher and slips between worlds, she isn’t escaping. She’s being invited to look deeper—to face the dark, to understand grief as something that can be walked through, not avoided.

Fantasy matters because it teaches us the work of wonder: that curiosity is not naiveté, and awe is not ignorance. It is an act of radical attention.

2. Language as Portal

In Ink & Ivy, language becomes a literal form of creation. Marisol, a young lady who runs a magical bookshop, discovers that what she writes can change the world around her. Her stories don’t just describe—they summon. But with every word comes responsibility; every metaphor has consequences.

This, too, is the work of writers: to understand that words are not harmless. They shape what we see. They summon possibility—or erase it.

In Ink & Ivy, the girls’ language becomes a living thing, something that resists control. The “pale man,” a figure who feeds on imitation and distortion, thrives on empty words—stories written without care, without truth. The girls learn that creation, to be sacred, must be done with reverence.

Fantasy, at its best, reminds us of the power of language. We speak worlds into being. We dream communities into possibility. We write our own maps through darkness. The portal isn’t the wardrobe or the dreamcatcher or the bookshop door. It’s the sentence itself—the turning of one word into another.

3. The Sacred Ordinary

Many people think fantasy is escapist because it contains dragons, spells, or portals. But what if those things are simply metaphors for what already lives within us? The dragon, in Dreamcatcher, isn’t just a beast—it’s fear, grief, the inheritance of pain. When Dash confronts it, she’s really confronting the trauma of generations, the unspoken stories that haunt her family.

And when Marisol in Ink & Ivy writes her way through grief, her pen becomes both wand and weapon—an instrument of creation that heals by revealing.

Fantasy is the literature of the sacred ordinary. It allows us to approach heavy truths with the gentleness of myth. It helps us say what cannot otherwise be said.

I think of Indigenous storytelling—how coyote and wind, willow and raven are not just symbols, but relatives. Fantasy, in its truest sense, carries that same heartbeat: it teaches us that the world is alive, responsive, and holy in its strangeness.

When readers step into Dreamcatcher or Ink & Ivy, I don’t want them to find an escape hatch. I want them to find a mirror. I want them to feel what it means to hold grief and beauty in the same breath, to remember that imagination is not a luxury—it’s an inheritance.

4. Why We Still Need Fantasy

In an age of data and disconnection, we need stories that remind us what it feels like to be human. Fantasy does that. It re-enchants the world. The modern world is noisy with explanation. We want everything to be understood, categorized, proven. But what if the point of wonder is not to be solved, but to be stayed with? Fantasy slows us down. It asks us to listen. It gives us permission to imagine again—a radical act in a culture of cynicism.

When I visit workshops, I often tell young writers that fantasy is not an escape from truth; it’s a different route to it. The language of magic lets us speak about mental illness, loss, and love in ways realism sometimes can’t. A dragon can hold more honesty than a diary entry. A spell can say what a scream cannot.

In Dreamcatcher, the dream world exists because Dash’s waking life is too painful to face directly. In Ink & Ivy, the written world becomes a refuge from grief—but also a reminder that creation without integrity can destroy as easily as it heals. Both stories are, at their heart, about the power of imagination to rebuild us.

We still need fantasy because the world is still breaking—and fantasy shows us how to mend.

5. The Door Within the Reader

Every time a reader opens a book, they cross a threshold. They leave behind their certainty and step into language. That act—quiet, solitary, miraculous—is the closest thing we have to magic. When I write, I try to make that doorway visible. Sometimes it’s a dreamcatcher. Sometimes it’s a bookshop in a forgotten town. But always, it’s a passage between the seen and the unseen, the possible and the impossible.

Fantasy matters because it reminds us that those borders are permeable. It whispers that the ordinary world is threaded with portals if only we know how to look. And maybe that’s the point—not to lose ourselves in the unreal, but to find our way back to the real with our eyes open wider, our hearts more attuned to wonder.

6. Closing the Circle

In Dreamcatcher, Dash returns home after her journey through Baumwelt, carrying both loss and wisdom. In Ink & Ivy, Marisol learns that creation is not about control—it’s about connection. Both stories close with the same truth: that every world we build through language eventually leads us back to ourselves.

When I walk along the lake near my home in Minnesota, I often think about the way water mirrors sky—the way two worlds touch without truly merging. That thin line of reflection is where my stories live: the between-place where reality brushes against dream. Fantasy still matters because it keeps that shimmer alive.

In the end, every book is a portal. Every reader, a traveler. Every word, a small act of faith that the invisible still matters—that imagination, like water, can still cleanse, connect, and carry us home.

“Whimsy and Bliss” by Angela Grey

Shady Oak Press (2025)
ISBN: 978-1961841468
Reviewed by Stephanie Elizabeth Long for Reader Views (09/2025)

Abigail Whimsy and Lainey Bliss have been best friends since the second grade. Like yin and yang, their opposites somehow fit together like errant puzzle pieces. Whimsy exists in a world of vibrant dreams and imagination, while Lainey is pragmatic and even-keeled, which anchors Abigail. Because nothing good can last forever, the girls have one final summer together before Lainey goes off to a fancy college, leaving Abigail behind.

Before Lainey leaves, Abigail has devised a plan. They will create a map (complete with a detailed legend) and explore all the mysteries of their town—dismantle the “thin” places, using her late grandmother’s journal (chaotic musings) as a guide.

As they delve deeper into the journey, Abigail’s reality becomes skewed, and Lainey’s attempts to keep her friend’s sanity in check become more difficult. The places they visit awaken a humming within Abigail, and the more they add to the map, the louder the hum becomes.

Whimsy and Bliss is a coming-of-age literary masterpiece. Angela Gray’s writing is known for its vivid imagery and deep metaphors, and this novel is no exception. Readers will quickly be immersed in Abigail’s world of wanderlust, where magic and realism become blurred. Beyond that, the character-driven story explores themes of friendship, self-discovery, and bridging the transition from childhood to young adulthood.

Sometimes it can be hard to decipher the difference between imagination and illness. The author has done an excellent job of illustrating Abigail’s unraveling—the whispering of nature, the ebb and flow of the hum, and the excitement turned obsession. With every place Abigail and Lainey traversed, I fell more in tune with Abigail’s frequency, at times questioning what was real and what was fictitious—this is the type of story that makes you see the world differently.

Whimsy and Bliss certainly highlights the plight of mental illness, particularly hypomania. Still, at its core, the novel’s overarching message is one of connection and trust—it’s the impenetrable sisterhood between two young women on the cusp of adulthood. In a world that is often stuck in the me-versus-you mentality, the solidarity between friends is refreshing, teaching us that we don’t have to suffer alone; we can lean on others for support.

For readers who love young adult books about friendship and adventure with a focus on mental health, this literary gem will appeal to you. Angela Gray’s exquisite prose is unmatched, and the multilayered characters are memorable. Abigail and Lainey’s map of thin places will forever hold a special place in my heart.

Of Laughter & Heartbreak book trailer

This is the summer of locked doors, fragile rituals, and the ghosts that keep count.

I’m Stevie Matthews—almost sixteen, the kind of girl people whisper about. “Bat-shit crazy,” they say. Maybe they’re right. This summer, the order cracks. Obsessive thoughts tighten like barbed wire, rituals multiply, and the only way forward is a hospital stay I never asked for.

Behind those doors, I meet strangers who feel both broken and familiar, each carrying their own secret galaxies of fear and hope. Together, we make a kind of map—messy, jagged, stitched with laughter, unraveling with heartbreak.

This is the story of how I learn that friendship can be born from accident, that healing isn’t neat or pretty, and that sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.

This book is a tender, unflinching portrait of adolescence, OCD, and the fragile alchemy of survival—equal parts bruised and luminous, like a diary written in ink and ghost light.

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