Serenity

Patrick Healy, a teacher, traveled around the world, talked with people in different places, and collected around 500 myths, legends, and folktales and their several alternative versions. His opinion and comments (directly or indirectly) are inevitable. This is the sixth volume of his work, 61 Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Books 1 and 2, in his words. He retold the stories with his opinion and approach to them. Patrick is an Australian writer who has an abiding interest in the folklore of different cultures. He has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over 25 years as a high school teacher.

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: She must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful 13-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims - a bit too strongly.

It starts with a simple favor—an ordinary kindness mothers do for one another. When her best friend, Emily, asks Stephanie to pick up her son Nicky after school, she happily says yes. Nicky and her son, Miles, are classmates and best friends, and the five-year-olds love being together—just like she and Emily. A widow and stay-at-home mommy blogger living in woodsy suburban Connecticut, Stephanie was lonely until she met Emily, a sophisticated PR executive whose job in Manhattan demands so much of her time.