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For example, Dorset sat on a stalled subway train more than once while riding Boston’s T, and for all she knows, goblins were responsible for the breakdowns.Cover and internal design © 2014 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

“Everything that happens in the book actually happened to me,” she insists about the magical underpinnings to the novel’s contemporary setting. This is the first time Dorset has written fantasy, but definitely not the last, she says, declaring, “It’s the most fun ever.” A newly minted law professor at the University of Mississippi, the author says she set The Girl Who Never Was in Beantown because she lived there when she had the dream. In the novel, as Selkie Stewart turns 17, the Boston teen realizes that everything she’s ever been told about who she is has been an elaborate lie to conceal the truth about her parentage. “If that’s how your parents met, how would that shape your life?” she wondered. After unsuccessfully trying to write about the ogre and the fairie, Dorset shifted gears and focused on their child. In addition, they lived in a supernatural world in which beings could “fall into other people’s houses and not realize it,” she explains. Musing on a story that would explain the dream, she concluded that the man was an ogre and the woman a fairie. “I had a dream a few years ago that a guy I didn’t know walked into his Boston brownstone and found a blonde woman he didn’t know sleeping on his couch,” she says.

Not just a dream, as in a life’s ambition-but literally a dream. Skylar Dorset says a dream compelled her to write her debut YA fantasy novel, The Girl Who Never Was (Sourcebooks, June), the first of a pair of Fairie Court books.

The Girl Who Never Was by Skylar Dorset