She only hopes that in the weeks to come she can make headway to figure out how to make the bookstore profitable again and what to do with the blue cottage that her grandparents made a life together in. Believing that her future is already planned out with a future fiancè in London, she finds herself more drawn into the fairy story that she is reading bit by bit along with visiting her grandmother in a nursing home suffering from dementia whose time is very limited. Even well reknown Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced that the photographs of the fairies were proof they existed.Īs Olivia Kavanagh takes over the inheritance left to her by her grandfather, an old bookstore with the name of Something Old, it is a place that draws a different life for Olivia. To wait out the return of her father and husband from the war going on. It is the very reason that Frances and her mother came to stay at the Cottingley cottage.

For others in the Cottingley village it gave them hope at a time when the world was dealing with the war not knowing if husbands, fathers or sons would be returning. It was enough to convince her Aunt and Uncle as well as her own mother that fairies did exist and just outside their back door. It was Elsie's idea to stage a stunt using her talented artistic skills in creating such life like details of fairies and stage a photo to look like Frances was interacting with them right in front of her. She knew without proof no one would believe her and like most 9-year-old girls at the time, she desperately wanted to tell her oldest cousin Elsie. It would be published until many years later but it was the story of how Frances first found the fairies while sitting in a beck near a waterfall and caught them out of the corner of her eye. The story was written by Frances Griffiths in 1917-1924 which later became its own published work entitled Notes on a Fairy Tale. It is written in two time periods, one present day and the other a story read by the present day Olivia Kavanagh about the two young girls who played a prank that last more than 70 years. Until I picked up The Cottingley Secret by Hazel Gaynor, I had never heard of the Cottingley fairies and thus this is what excited me about this book. There are those that believe that just because you might have never seen them, doesn't mean they don't exist, even for those who have claimed to have seen them.

The cottingley secret