Paradise Sands: A Story of Enchantment

A young girl travels with her three brothers to pick up their mother from the hospital. They stop to pick flowers for her on the way, and spy a strange, silent building. Entering, the three brothers drink the cool water, eat the food laid out on the table, and dive into a swimming pool, where they transform into dolphins—joining the menagerie that inhabits this strange, desolate hotel.

The girl approaches a lion, who introduces himself as the Teller. She bargains for freedom for herself and her brothers by promising to spend three days at the hotel without eating or drinking—but the Teller says if she takes any food or water, she will be trapped there forever. She spends three days without taking anything for herself, but she takes some water for the flowers. When three days elapse, the Teller says that she has partially fulfilled the bargain, and lets her go—on the condition that one day her own children will visit the hotel, and if they eat or drink, they will be trapped.

The girl and her brothers visit their mother, and the girl gives her mother the flowers; she recognises that the flowers are from Teller’s Hollow. The family travel home together.

An intensely beautiful picture book, densely layered with meaning. The nonsense rhyme about Teller’s Hollow introduced in the beginning, which their mother told to them and which the brothers quote throughout the book, predicts their journey and entrapment. This element gives the story a fairytale, folk-story construction; it feels both familiar and different to stories of Fair Folk or Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans.

The rhyme, and the mother’s recognition of the flowers at the end, leaves readers with the impression that she may have experienced the same journey as her daughter in her youth—that this is the next step in an endless cycle. 

Her presence in the hospital draws a connection between the fantastical journey and a more earthly story of institutionalisation and inherited illnesses. Dense visual symbolism is used throughout: the girl becomes a tiny statue in a model of the hotel; the sandstorm the girl is enveloped in when the hotel collapses mimics the sandstone walls of her mother’s hospital. 

Keen-eyed readers searching for meaning in this strange, cyclical modern fairytale of sacrifice, selflessness, and destiny will be in for a treat. The illustrations, in Pinfold’s distinctive watercolour and gouache style, are surrealist and stark, giving the book a striking, mythic quality.