The Magical Merry-Go-Round

Beautifully illustrated with bold full-color paintings, The Magical Merry-Go-Round celebrates the universal appeal of the carousel and the fanciful imaginations of children who ride the merry-go-round and pretend the horses are real. They lead their horses off into various exciting adventures and lose themselves in the happiness of their dreams, finding the pleasures that come with pretend.

Ruth Mugridge Snodgrass is the author of two books of memoir about small-town family life in Somerset County, Pennsylvania: Dark Brown Is the River (2004), set in the Great Depression of the 1930's, and its sequel, On Goes the River: The Somerset Years (2006), set in the late '30's and the years of World War II. Currently residing in Dover, Ohio, Snodgrass is a retired teacher of English, French, speech, and dramatics. She first wrote "The Magical Merry-Go-Round" as a song around 1987. While promoting her first two books at a local artists' fair in October 2007, Ruth met Catherine Fithian of Navarre, who was displaying her artwork. A retired administrator in the juvenile attention system, Fithian gives private and group classes at the Linden Tree Fine Art Studio in North Canton. Catherine bought one of Ruth's books, and Ruth signed up for art lessons, even though at the time she was two years older than the upper limit of "Art Lessons for Ages 7-77" promoted on Catherine's business card. In the spring of 2008, while discussing Ruth's dream of creating a children's picture book around the lyrics of her song, the two decided to collaborate, sharing the tasks of composition, drawing, and coloring.