Hollow Tree and Deep Woods Book

In a city apartment called the House of Many Windows, a storyteller and his young listener enact an ancient ritual. The Little Lady is four, going on five, and she has exacting standards. Every night by firelight, while she's being undressed, she demands stories, sometimes new ones, sometimes old favorites that must be told in the exact same words, word for word, because she remembers everything. If the Story Teller forgets or dares to improve a plot, she sets him right immediately. What emerges is a tender portrait of childhood's fierce demands: its love of repetition, its insistence on truth, its ability to transform an ordinary apartment into a kingdom of the imagination. Paine writes with gentle humor and deep affection about the collision between a child's perfect memory and an adult's tendency to embellish, a conflict every parent who has told a bedtime story will recognize. This is a book about the sacred, demanding intimacy of being trusted with a child's imagination.