Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Truth About Stone Hollow and the Genre of Time-Slip Fantasy

Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s 1974 novel The Truth About Stone Hollow is situated at the crossroads of historical fiction and fantasy, and uses the genre of time-slip to explore how the past impacts the United States’ shifting national identity, and its protagonist’s coming-of-age. The heroine’s magical, frightening contact with the past demonstrates the incompleteness of memory, and its effect on the formation of identity. Her reckoning with the wrongs of the past, both familial and national, provides her with historical knowledge that is fluid and unstable, but also profoundly rooted in place, family, and nation.