Once Upon an Effing Time: A Novel

A quirky, thrilling, darkly-funny page-turner that explores the fuzzy lines between sanity and insanity, magic and reality, love and duty.

It’s 1969 and eight-year-old Elizabeth and her mother Margaret make a daring escape from their hard life in a factory town in Ontario’s cheese belt. Stealing a school bus and slipping across the US border, they believe they are destined for greatness—and when Elizabeth discovers she can tell the fortunes of the desperate in roadside diners, she knows she’s found their ticket to a better life in California. 

But when strangers appear with the promises of utopia, Margaret drifts into the deranged world of a doomsday cult, and young Elizabeth has no choice but to follow, watching as her mother slips further into a life of apocalyptic fervor. 

Thrilling, sharp, gutting, and uplifting, Once Upon an Effing Time is a story of 1970s counterculture, shifting realities, the unpredictable behavior of love, and the struggle to leave the past behind. 

Buffy Cram is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, an entrepreneur and a farmer. Reviewing her book of stories, Radio Belly (2012), the Globe and Mail pronounced her “a whip-smart storyteller who aims to shake up our reading expectations in ways that delight.” She has been a fiction finalist for the Western Magazine Awards, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won a National Magazine Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and lives on Salt Spring Island, BC.