Right now you’re saying, “This isn’t the way I remember it ending.â€?

Funny thing, I have to admit that I changed the ending.

You have to understand that Florin is a country where two months out of the year, the weather is quite pleasant. The rest of the year it’s either raining or snowing, or an ill wind blows something from the Fire Swamp across the countryside. That kind of climate would tend to make anyone’s outlook bleak, and many are the people who’ve taken the long walk off of the Cliffs of Insanity. Morgenstern, fortunately, wasn’t one of them, but that kind of sentiment still showed up in his writing.

Of course, you can’t tell that to a ten-year-old in New York when a war was breaking out all over Europe and everyone was just waiting for us to join the fight. So my father always wrapped it up with an “and they lived happily ever after,â€? and I grew up with that part of my innocence intact.