Some Kind of Fairy Tale

Some Kind of Fairy Tale

No matter what you might think, I'm not actively looking for novels about girls who disappear. Although this book would appear to have quite a similar plot line to The Uses of Enchantment (reviewed previously), the fact that I've read two such novels in the same month is purely coincidence.

I picked Some Kind of Fairy Tale up off the New Book shelves at the library. I read the introductory paragraphs, found them rather intriguing, and decided to give the book a try. I was actually more attracted to the language than the plot line.

Good thing, too, because the story wasn't all that much. In a nutshell: 16-year old Tara Martin disappeared from the Outwoods, an old, old forest in the heart of England, 20 years ago. No one ever knew what had become of her. Now she has come back.

Tara has scarcely aged at all in the time she's been gone. To anyone at all acquainted with English folklore, it's perfectly obvious that she's been stolen away by the fairies ("Don't call them that! They don't like to be called that!" she keeps insisting to everyone.) Her family, however, flat out doesn't believe her.

The story had promise, but ultimately it doesn't really go anywhere. We have flashbacks into her time in Faeryland (which put me in mind of a 60's hippie commune). We have interviews with her psychiatrist. We have discussions about how her disappearance effected her brother, her parents, her boyfriends. And we have a whole lot of shifting around of points-of-view. None of these aspects of the novel are really anything to grab the attention. It's not a terrible book, but it's not a terrific one, either.