In Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living, fanciful characters that one can identify with battle personal problems, mishaps, and mayhem. None of them are guaranteed a happily-ever-after, but by applying the fundamentals of general semantics-a communications-based self-help system-they are better able to evaluate and understand everyday conundrums to successfully vanquish challenging situations. While these twenty-four stories may not be true in the literal sense, G.K. Chesterton observed that, "Fairy tales are more than true not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."