Author: Tiffany Nicole Smith
Publisher: (website unlocated) Twisted Spice Publications
Rating: TBD
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Errata in review copy:
The term "...pulling a rolled up piece of paper from her from her wand..." doesn't make sense (no page number to hand! It's at the point where the fairies first appear)
Smith repeatedly uses 'Huntsmen' when it looks like she ought to be using 'Huntsman': p17, p18, p34
p19 "I hated it when she was upset to me" - "…upset with me"?
p66 "This caused Angel to jump on the kitchen and…" should be "This caused Angel to jump onto the kitchen table and..."
p67 there seems to be a problem with the comma and the spacing after "(whatever that was)…"
p74 "Don’t hate because we whooped your carcasses…" should be "Don’t hate us because we whupped your carcasses…"
p82 "Where's she'd go…" should be "Where'd she go..."
p111 "Where are you-know-you" should be "where are you-know-who?"
This may haunt me for the rest of my blogging life, but you know what? I don't freaking care; I loved this novel! That's weird because I'm not a fairy story lover, and especially not when even the writers of such tales admit to their own embarrassment by re-naming their characters "Fae", the stealth term for "fairy". Delightfully, Smith doesn't do this, which is good because the only 'Fae' I actually tolerate are in the TV show Lost Girl which I adore. My love isn’t for main character - as per usual. Bo strikes me as boring. My love is for one of the secondary characters. Initially it was for Kenzi (who I will assert still has it, even though she's been going somewhat downhill in entertainment value lately) and Tamsin, who is completely kick-A, especially in her current "incarnation". She's definitely taken over as my favorite of the show, but of course, Lost Girl is very much a grown-up show, so it’s not likely to interest the same readers who would find Fairylicious appealing (not for some years to come at least!), but believe it or not, I found Fairylicious equally entertaining in its own way.
So why this novel when other fairy stories have rendered me completely uninterested? Well for one thing, this whole novel is so joyfully playful, and yet so determinedly serious about the fluff that I couldn’t resist it, and I appreciated the unabashed use of 'fairy' and especially the shameless title! I may endure regrets in the blogger world for admitting this, but this novel is a winner. It’s been a while since I've reviewed anything on the younger end of the reading scale, so I decided to blitz three such stories en suite to help make up the deficit. All three turned out to be worthwhile reads, but it was this one in particular (the one written for the most mature of the three audiences) which really impressed me. It just goes to show that you can write a technically deficient novel, yet still win my approval if you tell an entertaining story!
Perhaps I shouldn't use this phrase since I just started in on an audio book of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but my blood warmed to Fairylicious right from the start with main character Bex (never Becky!) and her six-year-old younger sister Ray (Reagan), and their intriguing back story: Bex loves her younger aunt, is estranged from her mother, the middle sister, and detests her older aunt. And there's much more to that back story, believe you me. This book is the start of a series and it looks like it’s planned to extend at least through book 4 of the Fairylicious world. Scarily enough, I am definitely interested in reading more!
Bex, a resident of Boston, USA, is described as a "preteen" (she's eleven). She's very smart and attends a school for gifted children called GATE (Gifted and Talented Education Center). Both Ray and Bex once attended "The Gate" but Ray was expelled for biting a teacher! Bex is also a redhead with a huge mane of tangled hair which she hates to brush. Shades of Neverfell! Bex & Ray's parents are nowhere in the picture. Her father is in prison, and he apparently gets letters from her mother, but her mother left for Europe for a month when Bex was nine, and Never Came Back. I suspect we'll learn much more of her in future volumes.
Bex suffers for her parents misadventures in the form of being teased, even harassed over her family, at school. That's one thing which bothers me about this novel: the endless harassment which never seems to be addressed, not only from other students, but occasionally from teachers. I see it in a disturbingly large number of YA novels and I can't help but wonder if the authors are writing about the school of their youth rather than about modern schools. I have two children who have been in three schools between them and not in any one of those schools was bullying and harassment even countenanced, much less passively tolerated. I can see how the outcast or misfit student can make for a good story, but it's becoming something of a cliché these days.
After an uneventful weekend, it’s "Mopey Monday" and Bex reunites with her friends Lily-Rose, a talented violin player, and with Chirpy (Beatrice) a swimmer, and Marishca, a Gymnast who had moved from Russia two years previously. Here's where I found a part I did not like: Smith seems rather condescending here towards Russians in having Marishca pronounce all her 'th' sounds as 'zee'. This doesn't work because, for one thing, the rest of her pronunciation is flawless! To me this just seemed insulting. If you visit You Tube and actually listen to Russians speaking English there, you'll see that the ones who speak English as well - as Marishca does - do not mangle their 'th' sounds. It's only the ones who speak very limited English who do this, so personally I'd like to see that aspect of the story disappear as though a fairy whisked it away!
Anyway, these four girls are "the Tribe" - the oldest girls in the school, and Bex is the "Biggest" of them, describing herself as "big-boned". At least two of the tribe hang with Bex because she's big enough to protect them from bullying by other students, but it doesn’t save her from being the brunt of jokes. This occurs, in one example, when the class is asked to tell everyone about their weekend, and Bex makes up a story about a trip to Hawaii because her real weekend was so boring. One of the three Avas in her class (Ava G, Ava M, and Ava T - there are are many more in the school) calls her on it because Bex doesn't know the name of the island she was on. This same Ava, after giving her seven kinds of grief, then demands to be invited to her birthday party!
Bex seems to have a real facility for somehow managing to impose her personal issues upon others by always managing to translate them into situations in which her friends become involved to their own cost! When she was unjustly punished for verbally retaliating on Ava G, she was required to write a list of twelve nice things about Ava to make up for the insult. Ava goes unpunished. Bex can think of only one item for her list: Ava is rich(!), so she surreptitiously passes the sheet around the class to have her friends fill in the eleven blanks. She reads it back to the class without perusing it first, and the list is hilarious. One item which really tickled me was: "If you put an 'L' in front of her name it would be Lava" There are so many instances of this kind of laugh-out-loud humor that I couldn't not love this story. Yeah, I know that these things may not find your funny bone the way they found mine, but I did get the feeling that Tiffany Nicole Smith is a person with whom you could have some really fun conversations.
Bex believes in fairies and she believes that a fairy dies when someone says they don’t believe in them (which is, of course, why fairies are so rare - I killed a dozen of 'em just now with a thoughtless chant….). This is on par with the remark which Gwen's friend Lesley makes in Kerstin Gier's Emerald Green which made me laugh. The thing that I found a bit odd here, given that this is a fairy tale (so to speak!), is that getting on for half of the way in, we still hadn’t met a fairy! Don't worry about that, however: when they arrived, they were truly worth waiting for. Yes, they! I honestly can't believe I'm saying this, but it's true, and they took me completely by surprise. I was definitely not expecting the hilarious fairies which Smith delivered, but I was thrilled to get these fairies and no other.
Because Bex's Nana (her grandmother with whom she lives) is on a fixed income, Bex doesn't get much in the way of luxuries or treats (I can empathize with that childhood, believe me!). The worst aspect of this is that she cannot even have her own birthday party - she has to share with the her triplet cousins, who are younger, and ill-behaved, not to say obnoxious. It's via a birthday wish that Bex summons her fairies.
I have to record at this point that Smith has an annoying habit of jumping, in time, in her writing without offering any indication whatsoever in the text (for example by leaving a blank line, or by adding three asterisks or something). She simply goes right onto the next line and a whole night, a week-end, even a week or more could have passed in the meantime, but she really knows how to write endearing characters which helps to gloss over this flaw. Nonetheless, a flaw it is. I hope it was corrected in the final version of this novel.
I found that even a fairy-hater like me was drawn into this story, starting to empathize with Bex, who is always trying to be strong and decent despite her personal misfortunes (and perceived misfortunes). That was something of a surprise, but the further I progressed into this novel the more I realized that it's seriously lacking a good editing job! At least in the review copy I have. Punctuation is sometimes poor. For example, there's more than one instance of there being a comma between two words with no accompanying space, or the space appears before the comma. There's also at least one instance of a question being asked with no accompanying question mark.
I also have to repeat that Smith's habit of skipping ahead in time or moving the narrative to a new setting without offering the reader an indication that things have changed (such as including a couple of blank lines, or separating the two sections with three asterisks or something) was common and grew to be as confusing as it was annoying. Hopefully that will be edited out of the final release! At one point (on page 86), for example, Smith has Bex going from talking with two guys as they exit the school drama room on one line to Bex and Reagan running downstairs at home to greet their favorite Aunt Alice on the very next line with no indication whatsoever of any transition. She does it again on the very next page. This novel is over 120 pages, and there are only nine chapters; splitting it up into more chapters - at these very points - would have been a good move. Had this novel been less entertaining, I would have considered quitting reading it because of this annoyance, but I have to confess that it's a real credit to Smith that she managed to keep a jaded fairy-phobe like me interested. The story is fine, wonderful even; it’s just the editing which needs some work!
I need to quit giving out spoilers, but let me just say here that Bex and her three friends each get their own fairy. The problem is that each fairy is like something from a second-hand store. They were like hand-me-down fairies, which I found hilarious. There's also a back-story here, which I very much appreciated. Bex's friend Lily-Rose Johnston gets Blush, an entirely pink fairy who is allergic to pixie dust. The entirely blue fairy is Iris, who belongs to Chirpy, aka Beatrice Martin. This fairy is rather acrophobic and suffers from air-sickness! Olive is, of course, the green fairy who belongs to Marishca Baranov. This fairy has mis-matched wings. Rebecca Carter, aka Bex gets the yellow fairy named Maize who is actually missing an entire wing.
Bex is depressed by her dad's incarceration, but Maize evidently can’t fix that; fairies don’t get involved in legal issues. That seemed a bit arbitrary to me since no real explanation was given, but hey, it’s a kid's fairy story, so let it ride. Actually, even that was somewhat amusing. The other three girls rebel and return their fairies to Bex! They can't stand the disruption that the fairies cause! Evidently they don't have the logic to work out that they must make very specific requests (they're kids, after all), and here's where the sorry truth comes out: the fairies themselves are rejects! They were kicked out of fairy land. I love this.
So the other three girls 'return' their fairies to Bex, not wanting them around any more, but Bex refuses to give up on them. The one thing I don’t get is why Bex never thinks of saving the school programs that are scheduled to be cut by asking her fairy to help. That might result in disaster of course, so it's as well that she doesn't. Instead, she takes the admirable tack of organizing a feisty rebellion (even if it's misguided)! She doesn’t seem to get that rebelling isn't going to make money appear (maybe that's a job for a fairy?), but it works out in unexpected ways. Unexpected is one of the attractions of this novel and made me keep on reading it. I have to include here a mention of the school show. As part of Bex's plan, the kids disrupt the school talent show and the "modern version" of Jack and the Beanstalk performed by Charlie and Santiago was hilarious. I don't know where Smith comes up with these notions, but I sincerely hope she doesn't lose the knack of it.
I love the notes going back and forth between Bex and one of her teachers, including her, um, creative spelling. There was an interesting episode on page 104 where Bex writes "fortay" and I was ready to add it to the errata when I realized it was a Bex note, intentionally misspelled. It should, of course, be "forte", which technically is pronounced 'fort', but everyone mispronounces it, including me. People tend to confuse it with the musical term which is spelled the same, and actually is pronounced 'fortay'. So let me just conclude with the one expected result of this novel: that things would work out in the end (but not everything - we need something left open for the sequels, right?!).
Anyway, I can't post any more spoilers much as I would love to keep raving about this. I highly recommend this novel and seriously plan on getting my hands on the series. Yeah, I can't believe I actually liked a (literal) fairy story, but I did! It was too much fun to not like, and it just goes to prove that you should never say never! I recommend this novel for appropriate ages and other ages, and I rate it a worthy read.
