The novelist Ema Božičević (1879 – 1942) published the collections of stories A Magical World (1916), In The Kingdom of Fulffilled Wishes (1923), and the romance novel Alemka (1918). The collection A Magical World (1916) contains eight stories: The Swallow, The Witch, The Serpent's Court, The Water King, Misery, The Lijerka, The Eagle, and The Sunbird. In the first part of the paper, relevant data from the biography and bibliography of Ema Božičević are presented, and the author is placed in the time and social context. The work of Ema Božičević is viewed in the context of the history of Croatian children's literature. Milan Crnković, Dubravka Težak, and Patricia Marušić dealt with it incidentally, but its place in the history of Croatian children's literature has not been sufficiently explored. The second part of the paper provides an analysis of the collection, where the emphasis is placed on the influence of the oral literary tradition in the shaping of the author's text by Ema Božičević (dominant elements of fairy tales and legends). In the scarce literature, motif similarities with the prose of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić are mostly mentioned. A particular chapter in this paper is devoted to the relationship and similarities between the collections Tales of Long Ago and A Magical World.