The Cottingley Secret by Hazel Gaynor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Apropos that 1) this should come out on in the centennial of the hoax* and 2) that I should be reading it this year as well (I’ve been on the library wait list for a while and my turn finally came around).
I first learned of the Cottingley Fairies through “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World”. This book is a delightful speculation about how the hoax came to be and a study of how a seemingly innocuous prank can go wildly out of control.
The two timelines are easy to follow – I admit I preferred the historical one to the present day one, but they intersected nicely. (view spoiler)
*Frances Griffiths really did maintain to the end that “…there were fairies up there, or there were then. There aren’t now.” (ACCMW [YouTube] 19:17)
Oh, you had to go and remind me of this: https://jlsjlsjls.dreamwidth.org/1370198.html (and now, along with adding the book you’re talking about to my to-read list I have a serious urge to re-read the series that the page scans I’ve linked to are from)