Area landmarks take on magical glow in fantasy novel

What if fairy-tale characters were alive and well and living ordinary lives in Northborough? Would Cinderella be seen zipping past the high school in a pumpkin-orange Subaru? Would Rapunzel run a hair salon in the center of town? Would Puss in Boots be darting about West Street and dining on Fancy Feast?

While still in high school, Northborough native Sarah Beth Durst, now 33, began mulling over just these kinds of questions, and her answers have gelled into her first published book: "Into the Wild," a young readers' fantasy novel set in her hometown.

Released in June by Penguin imprint Razorbill, the book does its part to place local landmarks like the Agway rooster on the literary map. The fanciful plot bounds from one familiar sight to the next -- from Bigelow Nurseries to the White Cliffs mansion and on into Shrewsbury and Worcester. But don't expect everything to look just like it does in real life.

In Durst's story, the fairy tale world has been reduced to an unruly mass of vines that lives under 12-year-old Julie's bed. Called "The Wild," the mischievous greenery occasionally steals sneakers, wreaks havoc on the plumbing if locked in the basement, and snores loudly at night.

It's also the greatest threat to all the fairy-tale characters who escaped to live lives of free will in the real world. If The Wild gets loose (and, of course, it does), folks like the self-obsessed "Goldie" (Goldie Locks), who can't seem to get her hair just right, and Julie's mom "Zel" (Rapunzel) will be forced back into Story Land to relive their tales over and over again.

"Originally, I had the idea of, what if fairy tale characters were in the real world in my hometown? What would they do?" said Durst in a telephone interview from her current home in Stony Brook, N.Y. "But later, when I started writing the book, I started wondering, what would happen if the fairy-tale world wanted its characters back, and that's when the plot really took off."

Packed with magic and sparkling wit, the book generated multiple offers from publishers. The timing was right. In the Harry Potter era, publishers are eager to snap up well-written children's fantasy. In the end, Durst accepted a two-book contract and is working on a sequel that's due out in the summer of '08.

"I've always wanted to be a writer, since the age of 10," she said. "I was the kind of kid that always had a book under her arm. I actually remember going to a Red Sox game and I brought a book to read and my dad was totally appalled."

Northborough Public Library director Jean Langley remembers the avid reader with the curly red hair, constantly roaming the children's section.

"When she e-mailed us to tell us she had a book coming out, I knew immediately who she was," said Langley, who noted there is a waiting list at the library for Durst's book. "I remember her coming in here a lot, which makes sense. Most children's writers used the library a lot as kids."

The Northborough Public Library figures prominently in the plot, as does a librarian, who Durst said was not based on anyone in particular. Julie's trumpet-playing best friend Gillian is, however, inspired by Durst's real childhood best friend, Gillian Allen (born Harrell). The pair had a club of two, called The Swan Club, for which Durst often wrote plays. They'd rope their siblings into performances.

"It's a great honor to have a character named for me and it's a total surprise," said Allen, who now lives in North Carolina. "But I'm not surprised that Sarah became a writer. She was always very passionate about her pursuits."

In the book, Durst has her protagonist, Julie, living in Allen's former home on West Street, and she made the character Gillian's home her own former home on Crawford Street. Scenes throughout Northborough and Worcester were drawn from memory at first, because Durst hasn't lived in Northborough since she spent summers at home while studying English at Princeton.

"I did have to look at a map at some point, because when you're a kid being driven around by your parents, you're not really paying attention to how things actually connect to each other," she said. "And eventually, I did go back to Northborough and take pictures of different places that appear in the book."

Research completed, Durst then sent her plucky, flip-flop-wearing heroine out to save the day in the half-transformed terrain she created. Among other wonders, Julie finds a griffin "the size of a Greyhound bus" snoozing on the Interstate 290 bridge; Worcester's Higgins Armory Museum has stretched into a sky-scraping silver castle; and the Agway rooster has morphed into the evil witch's house that walks around on giant chicken legs (a reference to Russian Baba Yaga tales, in which witches live in houses with dancing chicken legs).

"It was always clear to me that I'd write fantasy. I love books where something wondrous happens," said Durst. "Basically, if a story doesn't have a talking cat, I'm not interested."

Durst is also firm on several other literary points.

"I feel really strongly about humor. I tend not to like books that don't have humor," she said, "because I find them false, because I think humor is such a basic coping mechanism, and I also think it's important for books to be fun. That's one of the points of being a writer. You get to give people fun. You let them escape, and maybe create some new friends for them. You give them an adventure."

She also wasn't about to give into the common temptation to make her hero a boy.

"I've heard lots of marketing and publishing people say girls will read a book with either a boy or a girl protagonist, but boys will only read books with male protagonists, so it's harder to sell a book with a female hero," she said. "But it's just really important to have strong, female role models. Most of the books I write and like are the kind with really strong female characters, where a girl with special or extraordinary powers comes up against some insurmountable odds and kicks its butt."

In the end, it's not so much magic as Julie's extensive knowledge of fairy tales that helps her tame The Wild, and that trait is drawn straight from Durst's own life.

"I've always loved fairy tales. What I like is that they're so universal," she said. "People use fairy tales as a way of talking about and understanding the world, and I think that's really valuable, but also really cool. I like that there are these archetypes that are inside people's imaginations, and playing with those archetypes was just a lot of fun."

Sarah Beth Durst reads from her new fantasy novel "Into the Wild," about a fairy tale kingdom that overtakes Northborough, at 6 p.m., tomorrow at Pandemonium Books, 4 Pleasant St., Cambridge, 617-547-3721. This fall she'll visit Northborough Public Library, details to be announced. Read the first chapter and check out her blog at sarahbethdurst.com.