IN THE FANTASY BOOKS I loved to read as a kid, when children entered a magical world there was always a threshold—a wardrobe, a tollbooth, a certain pattern of turnings through the labyrinth, some borderland to cross between humdrum reality and the world beyond.
Every summer for most of my childhood, my family and I vacationed on an island. Islands are a kind of fairyland too; we’d take a trip across the nameless, featureless borderland of water (on a ferry that swallowed up our wood-paneled station
