Becca Sutter · Children's Picture Book

The Magical Divide

Written by Rebecca Sutter · Illustrated by Melissa Lettis

A girl. A crossing. The four seasons, alive as fairies — and a world whose harmony she must help restore. A story set to the music of Vivaldi.

The Story

Maya crosses the Magical Divide — the threshold between her everyday world and the living world of nature. On the other side she meets Mother Nature herself, and the fairies of the four seasons, each one moving to Vivaldi's music: spring's awakening, summer's fullness, autumn's turning, winter's rest.

But the Earth's balance is threatened. And it falls to Maya — not a hero with powers, but a child who has learned to see — to help restore the harmony of the seasons, and to carry nature's magic home to her friends, so they can see it too.

The Divide was never a wall.
It was a threshold, waiting for a child
willing to cross it.

Where It Came From

The Magical Divide was not written at a desk. It began in 2016, in a single listening: a remixed version of Vivaldi's "Spring," whose melodies carried a story that asked to be danced before it asked to be told. It became my first original ballet — created for the young dancers I teach — and the children lived inside Maya's story for a season before it ever became a book.

Only afterward did it cross its own divide: from stage to page, with Melissa Lettis's illustrations giving the seasons their faces. The story was embodied before it was ever written down — which is, I've come to believe, the right order.