Maven Fairy Godmother: Through the Veil by Charlotte Henley Babb.
I’m a fairy tale junkie and Maven Fairy Godmother is a winner for anyone who believes that every story should have a happy ending. Modern stories demand more of their happy endings. Princesses aren’t asking to be saved. They would rather save themselves.
Fairy Godmother Superior realizes that Fairy is dying. She’s got to recruit some new Fairy Godmothers or hundreds of years of work goes down the tubes. Neither of her two choices would be her first choices, or even her last, but she’s desperate.
Maven is an educated, unemployed woman in her fifties who is down on her luck and out of options. She responds to a call about a mysterious job interview. She is hired and wakes up in Fairy enlisted in Fairy Godmother boot camp. The first strike against her is that she is human, a mundane, someone from the other side of the veil. The Fairy Godmother Superior doesn’t seem to like her much and really doesn’t like the way Maven’s modern outlooks are introducing dangerously unorthodox ideas through the land.
Maven’s side-kick is even less viable as a candidate for Fairy Godmother status. Young and beautiful, Daisy is torn between her desire to save Fairy and to live in the Mundane, a place she dreams of often but has never visited. Enter a computer wizard, dragons, princes, wolves, helpless maidens, selfish maidens, dissatisfied maidens, with many offers of unrequited love. The story is rich with subplots, allegory, metaphors and literary allusions.
Maven Fairy Godmother is clever, witty, engaging. Unlike traditional fairy tales where the characters are flat archetypes we learn nothing about as individuals, Ms Babbs characters pull you in, developing round unforgettable personalities. Ms. Babb deftly weaves folklore, metaphor and human psychology into intriguing new fairy tales. She intertwines the basic rules of magic into an elegant, stylistically repeating admonition: be careful what you wish for.
I really enjoyed this read and it stayed with me for days. I was given a copy for review but was under no obligation to finish the book or review it. The opinions offered are strictly my own.
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