Ivy's Heart: My Favorite Photo

I'm excited to present Ivy's heart as part of Emily Casey's blog tour. The next stop on the tour is Tia Nevitt's blog on Sunday.

Emily Casey's The Fairy Tale Trap is about a girl named Ivy who gets sucked into Beauty and the Beast. She’s modern and snarky and she turns the fairy tale on its ear. But she has a vulnerable side that you get glimpses of every now and then. Most of them center around her mom and dad as she struggles to get back home.

Ivy’s Heart

Like most girls my age, I have a special connection with my dad. Unfortunately, he’s in the military, so he spends a lot of time overseas. I worry about him when he’s away because, you know, anything could happen.

That’s when I bring out my favorite photo. It’s a picture of him when he finished his first-ever marathon. He’s kind of a small guy, and he’s really skinny. We used to joke that just the sight of him would give the Kenyans second thoughts. His clothes are dusty, but he’s got this big goofy grin on his face. Whenever I look at that picture, I imagine that, wherever he is, my dad is happy, with the same goofy grin.

This picture means everything to me. We move around a lot, sometimes without Dad, so the photo is sometimes the only connection I have to him.

My story starts with me looking for the picture. It’s gone missing. I don’t know it at the time, but the picture was stolen. Someone took it because they knew how much it meant to me. If I had known the picture held so much power, I would have guarded it more closely.

But even without having it in my hands, the picture pulled me through some tight situations. There’s a part in The Fairy Tale Trap where my friends and I were under a spell. Thinking about the people I love was hard because the spell fogged up my brain. But the picture was still so vivid in my memory, my dad’s love found its way to me, even when I was stuck in a fairy tale.

Some day, I’ll get that picture back.

Note from Emily: Ivy’s dad is wearing a race number in the photo—number 2504. This particular number has significance for me, too. It’s the race number I wore for my first half-marathon in March 2010.

Emily is an awesome author who can be found on her blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. Her book, The Fairy Tale Trap is available on Amazon.

Ivy has always been afraid of mirrors, but she never knew why. Then one of them sucks her into the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. All she wants is to find her way home. But when she tries to escape, Ivy breaks the wrong spell. Now Beast is not so gentle-on-the-inside, Beauty is falling for the wrong prince, and Ivy is no closer to figuring out how to get through the enchanted forest that traps her.

With magic mirrors, dancing fairies, a sadistic pixie, and other random fairy tale twists, Ivy doesn’t know what’s safe or who to trust. Can she escape the fairy tale trap?