"If you'd once held a book that contained a whole other world in your hands--a world where you'd found a beauty and a love that has always eluded you in this one--and then you lost it, wouldn't you try to find it again? Wouldn't you always keep searching?"
As children, three wayward sisters--wandering the grounds of the family's mysterious seaside hotel in Northern California, on the day of an annual masquerade auction--discover (and steal) a highly desirable and expensive book. . . and accidentally fall into another, more magical world.