This book could not have come about without the Maine branch of my own family tree, who I spent summers with as a kid on an island, for better or worse, just as small as Darkhaven. You either love island living or you hate it, and unfortunately even though I have a lot of good memories of those summers, I admit my feelings about it are close to Ivy’s—too long surrounded by water and I feel claustrophobic. Still, five or six generations of my family managed to hang on in a tiny town on what is essentially a granite rock covered with dirt and a few trees, and without the deep roots they put down—and the stories my great-grandmother Hazel told about being adopted after her entire family was wiped out by tuberculosis—I would not have been able to write the story that became Dreaming Darkly. So thank you to Hazel, Edwin, Grandpa Keith, and the Snow family—I owe you.