The Fairy's Tale by F. D. Lee

I surprised myself by enjoying large sections of this book, I have read a few of the subverted fairy tale genre books now and some work better than others.  Fortunately this falls in to the latter category.  Clearly a lot of though has gone in to world building and the reader does get a fleeting sense of Bea's world and the land where the fairies (as a general catch all term for all magical creatures as opposed to the fae) are working to create belief.  That was one of the issues I had with the book, I never really got a full sense of either world so instead of imagining the action taking place in these settings I was very much reading it.

The set up for the story is a Snow White / Cinderella mash up, just as The Teller whocaresforus would have it - after all there is no room for anything away from the predetermined plot.  Well, there shouldn't be but Bea can't help but try to make things better and the characters can't help but be off script.  Bea should only be plot watching - as a lowly Garden Fairy she has no chance of becoming a Fairy Godmother but that doesn't stop her wanting - but she still manages to interfere.  This leads to the mysterious Mistasinon, the Plotter, giving her a chance at her very own tale - it should be straightforward but this is Bea and she doesn't disappoint.

Away from the main plot the book has, in true fairytale tradition, an awful lot to say about personal morals and societal morals.  Each land has it's own set of governances and challenges but it is in Bea's homeland that we really see state control and censure at it's worst - the Redactionists make The Child Catcher out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang seem like a kind and gentle man.  To be honest you could probably break the whole system of belief in the book down and write a very long thesis about it's symbolism.  Not a bad thing as it does make you think.

The only other issue I had with the book was some of the linguistics.  Some structures felt too convoluted to really grasp initially so there was a lot of reparsing sentences going on to bring concepts in to focus.  I also found the naming conventions for the places to be very clunky on an English speaking tongue and every time I came across a  place name I would jolt out of the story whilst my brain tried to figure out the best way to pronounce it.

I did come out of the book ready to continue in the world though and will, no doubt, purchase the further books in this series.