As an eight-year-old in 2013, author Thanael Kanter was quite the chatterbox. His favorite way to start a sentence was with the word "imagine".

“Imagine a flying car with a holographic steering wheel.”

“Imagine a dog collar that translates your dog’s thoughts to words you can hear.”

Thanael had so many fantastic ideations to share that his mother (and co-author), Lucia, would have to remind him to take bites of his food at the dinner table.

“Imagine a man who wakes up one morning and gold coins fall from his hair,” Thanael mused to Lucia one autumn morning in 2013 over a bowl of already soggy Cheerios...and then he continued chattering his imaginings as Lucia listened...and began typing. Thus was born this whimsical and transcendent fable, The Money Fairy.

It’s the chimerical chronicle of an ambitious family man, Armando, in the “Olden Times”, living a pleasant life in the fictional Italian Alps village of Cuor della Terra. He awakens one morning to gold coins tumbling from his hair.

It’s a careening tall tale that whisks you from the Italian Alps to Paris to the Midwest of the United States and from Brazil to the craggy, breathtaking shores of Sicily—all in the span of a bedtime story. It “breaks the fourth wall” by directly addressing the listener and combines old-world folktale elements with contemporary references. It is an utterly enchanting journey that reminds us how magic all around us—every day—is afoot!

Meet the characters:

• Armando and his wife, Elisa: a content and industrious couple living in Cuor della Terra, Italy with their four children
• Elisa’s grandmother, Lucia: a tennis champion from Brazil (but before tennis was invented)
• Francesco Bugatti: a Sicilian tennis champion who is challenged to a match by Lucia, and falls in love with her
• Marco: Armando’s brother, who has sailed across the ocean and lives in Illinois
• Abraham Lincoln: a friend of Marco’s and the 16th president of the United States
• Giuliano Cantore: a famous calendar savant
• Natanieul Gutriey: a famous Parisian weaver
• The Puttifurbi: mythical gnomes

The prevailing question, dear listener, is: Can you figure out “what’s really going on"?

(wink, wink)