As children, we sat wide-eyed and listened enthralled to 'once-upon-a-time' fairytales. In these stories, good and evil are always represented in stark monotones of black and white. Good always triumphs over evil and the wicked get their comeuppance. And children snuggle down in bed secured and comforted with the thought that 'everyone (except the nasty witch or wicked step-mother of course) lived happily ever after'.

Somehow during the growing up process, we discover that life never quite fits the formulaic fairytale mould. Naivete, trust and guilelessness are slowly displaced and disappointment, jadedness and cynicism creep in little by little. We experience reality in multi-varied hues and infinite shades of grey. Nothing is quite as straightforward as good is good and bad is bad. Sometimes when all these negative emotions become too much, we seek escape in the familiar comforting stories that used to lull us to sleep when we were kids.

This book was my attempt to escape into fairytale land. I flipped the pages and was magically transported into Pierre's world. The product of 'an unlikely liaison between a bumbling botanist and a ravishing yet distant Italian soprano', Pierre, 18, abandoned by her toy-boy-obsessed mother and her equally plant-obsessed father, begins working for kind, regular Guinness drinker, Mr Beaney, at his antique book shop in London.

Like strangers whose eyes meet across a crowded room, Pierre meets her man with the dancing eyes at Mr Beaney's annual fancy dress party. Wafting along on champagne, sweet peas and poetry readings on balmy nights, the couple became inseparable. When he looked at her, he saw her "surrounded by a troop of bonny babies. (His.)". He was a painter and she became his muse, posing for hours on end as he filled blank canvases with portraits of her.

"Alas, as it's been said, all good things must end (WHY?)."

The man betrays Pierre and she flees to the "city of her conception", New York seeking solace for her broken heart and healing for the cruelly inflicted emotional scars.

She makes friends with her downstairs neighbour, hairdresser Hubert, adopts a lovely dog, Froggy, goes on a string of dates, goes to see Ernest, a psychiatrist, makes merry with the Italian mafia in Brooklyn and hangs out in the mummy room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But images of him still invade her dreams and hearing Bob Dylan's "I want you" (their song) still reduces her to weeping.

How does the story end? Do they meet again and declare undying love for each other? With my penchant for stories with happy endings, dare you think otherwise?!

There is nothing new in this story, really. The story is as old as time, in the "girl meets boy, they fall in love, they break up and they get back together" pattern. Yet the fluid and poetic text and the stylish surrealistic ink drawings give the book a delicious flavour. It's almost like eating chicken rice and discovering that the cook has added a certain ingredient X that suddenly makes this simple common dish taste a little bit different, a little less ordinary and a lot more mouthwatering.