Author: Graham Joyce
Publisher: Doubleday
About the Book: It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phonecall from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery.
He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she's back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim.
But her stories don't quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young woman who walked out the door twenty years ago. Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara's one time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her. A haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family...
My thoughts: I am not really a fan of fairy tales and this did not make me one. It was just an okay read for me. Where I found the prose to be enjoyable, I could not get completely invested in the storyline. When Tara returns, she tries to spin some story about world travels, but it is not very believable -- especially since there has been no word from her at all in all that time. (She thought she had only been gone for 6 months when she first returns, as time in the fairy world travels at a different speed). Maybe it was because she was only 16, but she didn't seem invested in either world very much, she just kind of wandered through both (maybe that is what fairies do. . .)
Her family did try to run some different tests on her and had her visiting a psychiatrist to try to figure out what had happened to her, but nothing was very conclusive. Her boyfriend and brother both tried to reconnect with her, but neither had much luck. Maybe if I was a fairy tale fan this would have been a fantastic read, as I did like the author's style -- just couldn't relate to the story.
~I received a complimentary ecopy of this book from Edelweiss/Doubleday in exchange for my unbiased review.~
Some Kind of Fairy Tale
Publisher/Publication Date: Doubleday, June 2012
ISBN: 9780385535786
320 pages
