For five-year-old Mary Anne, a fairytale is something she has only read about with her mother, Nancy Jane, who had her at a very young age. But after she and her mother escape from an abusive situation in Chicago, their lives slowly begin to transform. The two of them run away to Mackenzie, Texas, to live with Nancy Jane’s grandmother and start a new life. There, Nancy Jane meets Davy Fahey, a sixteen-year-old. Nancy Jane, a young black woman who has endured abuse and family drug addiction issues since she was young, has lived a very different life from Davy, who has grown up sheltered in a white part of town for all sixteen years of his life. Nancy Jane challenges Davy to think outside of the white mindset – inviting him to dinner at her home, to meet a Mexican immigrant family who runs a restaurant where she gets an after-school job, and taking him to sermons at her church, run by a black pastor. Davy enjoys integrating into Nancy Jane’s life but still wonders: Why does everybody care about skin color? Love is love, and that’s all that matters.

While Nancy Jane and Davy fight for their love to be accepted by everybody in the town, little Mary Anne is watching their love story, and the fight to keep it very carefully. She keeps track of everything and eventually uses their love to tell a story of her own. She publishes a book, branded as a fairytale and which addresses racism experienced during black and white love stories.

Like all audiobooks in the Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, there is a happily ever after, but not without challenges along the way.