Fairy Tales
This is a recent contemporary fantasy furry romance novel. It’s fairly lighthearted, fun, and good.
On the furry side, it’s the fairly typical backgroundless furry contemporary world. Technology is about what we have (cell phones and all). Background isn’t really given, but we’re somewhere in the Midwest United States. And everyone is an anthropomorphic animal of various types, without any rhyme or reason (other than fitting the character, of course).
The contemporary fantasy side is fairly typical too. Magic exists, there are witches out there who largely keep an eye on things, and most everyone else will automatically default to a more ordinary explanation given any reason to do so.
Our inciting incident is when an ordinary-but-glamorous cat accidentally hits a weak place in the boundaries between realities and lets a large number of pixies into the normal world. Coyote goth witch-in-residence Tamara repairs the breech, puts a memory charm on the unfortunate Maddie, and starts thinking about how to round up the magical pests.
Glamor-cat Maddie is unexpectedly completely resistant to the memory charm, and eager to help out. And so our unlikely duo is born, with Maddie learning about the magical world, and both trying to find and catch the pixies before their mischief-making causes too much damage—possibly to the pixies themselves.
This isn’t a big ambitious novel trying to break new ground. It doesn’t need to be. It stands on its characters and a fairly easy-going plot. There’s a few more dramatic incidents, but the book is mostly at a steady but relaxed pace, keeping everything character focused the entire time. A lot of fun, well worth a read, and the door is left open to a sequel I would be happy to get.
I wish the hints to a possible sequel were introduced earlier in the story so that both we and the characters could reflect on how they would affect the plot, but I greatly enjoyed Fairy Tales. It felt like realistic lez rep (particularly cis lez rep written for women, something you don’t see often in the fandom). It touches on a lot of things that I haven’t really seen explored in other works: is this normal friendship behavior or does she like me, am I a predator for remaining friends with her while liking her, will she hate me if she finds out, the eternal pressure and judgement laid upon you by other women in the community to have children while they still evaluate your appearance to be satisfactory but also still needing that community to survive, etc. The few moments where we get to see Maddie’s fairy obsession from the eyes of others were really well done.
I wish the personalities of the 2 leads were pushed further. We constantly hear about how Tamara is a cynical, mean witch but at most we get sarcastic sometimes. And despite Maddie being head over heels for fairies and the fae world, we don’t really get to see that. Yes she has fairy statues, takes care of Ravel, and helps find all of the other loose fairies, but she never gets annoying about it. I wanted to see her constantly try to get information from Tamara about what she knows, have her go hunting for them herself instead of only after she and Tamara meet again in the cafe, maybe even consciously choose to prioritize saving a fairy over the well-being of another humanoid. Her photography hobby isn’t really examined either.
Some of the scenes with the teens were odd. Maybe the way they were behaving was supposed to be because they watched anime and absorbed some of its tropes into their personalities, but I would have preferred if A) that had been explicitly stated, if true, B) other characters responded appropriately to the things they were saying, or C) they had been rewritten to be less weirdly sexual. The story also gets dangerously close to having Tamara act as a mother for them despite her wishes to never be one, but instead settles for older sister. Tbh, I think most of what they added to the story would have worked better if Maddie was the one doing it/ having those traits instead.
Overall, I think Fairy Tales is a fun, light hearted story that many will enjoy. It is well-constructed, humorous, and builds an interesting structure for its magic systems without going in depth, leaving you wanting to learn more. It’s a step in the right direction for cis lez rep, but is definitely heavily influenced by het norms and traditional expectations for what a happy relationship is. Would read a sequel/more from this author.
I enjoyed your Firebearers Trilogy reviews as well. Some of my fave work from the fandom.
Some good comments. I’ll note that the book almost feels like a string of short stories hung together, just with the pixies and romance holding them together. i.e., it’s not a strongly plotted novel. (The twins’ intrusions into the plot are part of this.)
It also isn’t a strongly characterized one. I’m pretty sure that Tamara is supposed to be a stereotypical cynical mean goth until Maddie opens her up, but we don’t get to see her attitude strongly change; largely because that’s the face she presents to the world, and we’re mostly *inside* that prickly exterior because we’re often in her head.
And glad you liked Firebearers! I had the first two on my shelf for years waiting to get the third.