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    Some Kind of Fairy Tale: A Novel
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    Some Kind of Fairy Tale: A Novel
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    Some Kind of Fairy Tale: A Novel
    Ebook387 pages5 hours

    Some Kind of Fairy Tale: A Novel

    By Graham Joyce

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Acclaimed author Graham Joyce's mesmerizing new novel centers around the disappearance of a young girl from a small town in the heart of England. Her sudden return twenty years later, and the mind-bending tale of where she's been, will challenge our very perception of truth.

    For twenty years after Tara Martin disappeared from her small English town, her parents and her brother, Peter, have lived in denial of the grim fact that she was gone for good. And then suddenly, on Christmas Day, the doorbell rings at her parents' home and there, disheveled and slightly peculiar looking, Tara stands. It's a miracle, but alarm bells are ringing for Peter. Tara's story just does not add up. And, incredibly, she barely looks a day older than when she vanished.
     
    Award-winning author Graham Joyce is a master of exploring new realms of understanding that exist between dreams and reality, between the known and unknown. Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a unique journey every bit as magical as its title implies, and as real and unsentimental as the world around us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 10, 2012
    ISBN9780385535847
    Unavailable
    Some Kind of Fairy Tale: A Novel

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    Reviews for Some Kind of Fairy Tale

    4/5

    279 ratings38 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A missing girl turns up 20 years later and only 6 months older. No one believes her story about being spirited away (though it's an old one in that part of the world) The points of view range from the people she left behind to her psychiatrist to a nephew who's got his own troubles. It makes for an entrancing patchwork.
    • 4/5
      Just finished this one and I'm still digesting it. Much like The Tooth Fairy, this one will require multiple reads. I can feel the story settling into the back of my mind just like the other, and that's a good sign of a tale that will grow with me.
    • 4/5
      Probably 4.5 - best fairy tale since the last Charles DeLint - which has been too long, need to get back to that master.
      A dear friend saw me with this, was glad, proclaimed it her "favorite book of all time" which filled me with some trepidation (we don't often overlap in our taste with books). Fears were unwarrented, this was a wonderful read, a great re-telling of the fae tales we know.
    • 5/5
      It's become an everyday expression - someone is described as being "away with the fairies" if they seem to be woolgathering, or having odd ideas, or acting strangely. But what if someone came back after twenty years away, claiming actually to have been "away with the fairies"? How would that play with those who were left behind? What does such a disappearance do to family, friends, or the world at large? And how, then, do you undo it when the past comes to call?That Is the matter at hand in Graham Joyce's last novel, 'Some kind of fairy tale'. Tara returns to her parents' house twenty years after she disappeared, though for her, she claims that only six months have passed; six months that she spent in the Realm of Faerie, a place full of earth magic, intense colours and heightened lives full of lust, and love, and art, and death.Graham Joyce set this novel in his adopted home, the Charnwood Forest to the west of Leicester. The sense of place is such a major factor in this novel, placing the story in a mundane location of semi-rural England, but with the fantastical just a half-turn away. Like other later novels of his, Joyce populated the book with characters from real life contemporary England, and these are well drawn even if they have little more than walk-on parts. Tara turns up on her elderly parents' doorstep; but from an early stage in the book, the central character shifts to her brother, Peter, and her former boyfriend, Ritchie. Ritchie had been given a hard time by the police when Tara first disappeared; the disappearance also killed the friendship between Ritchie and Peter. Ritchie was perhaps the best-drawn of the characters; an aging muso whose career almost but not quite achieved lift-off. And there's an amusing sub-plot concerning Peter's son, Jack, a thirteen-year-old who is just beginning to discover that the world doesn't always work in his favour. Jack becomes involved, very much against his will, with another character who turns out to be full of surprises.The style is Joyce's trademark social realism, though I found that the humour quotient was increased in this novel. And one of the chapter-heading epigraphs was a naughty joke on Graham's part. All in all, I found it a compulsive read. The ending is not tidily wrapped up, but really could not have been any other way; and some of the characters find redemption. And the Realm of Faerie is always there, just around the corner...
    • 4/5
      Not going to include any spoilers. I thought this was well written with a well presented plot and good range of characters.
    • 4/5
      This was an asked for Christmas present - and I am very pleased with my choice.
      As an avid listeber to folk music I am very familiar with the "gone away with the fairies" genre of song and this brings a tale right up to date; telling the story and then examining the impact of a retuned abductee on friends and family; including a detailed psychiatric investigation.
      This is the first book of Graham Joyce's I have read, but certainly won't be the last. He writes equally well about about the fantasy, human and scientific aspects of the story and chooses very apposite chapter headings setting the story against the earlier tales and ideas. Recommended
    • 5/5
      An amazing contemporary fairy tale. A girl disappears some time before her 16th birthday. She is gone for 20 years and just as suddenly returns. This great book is about Tara and her family and friends. The way it unfolds seems completely true, the fantastic and the mundane. Of course no one believes her, but she is so sure, and the strange thing is, she hasn't aged a bit.
      When she left, her poor boyfriend was unfairly accused and has had a rough life since. He lost the friendship of her brother and now she has returned, they are reunited in the puzzle to solve that is Tara.
      There are undercurrents and side stories of those related to the family and all are richly drawn from human nature and our gadget and entertainment filled lives. You can see how everything described could be possible.
      I am happy to have found a new author to devour, and I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy, or just a well written story. Please be advised there is some profanity, but this just makes it more real.
    • 5/5
      Sitting down to Christmas dinner, Dell and Mary Martin hear a knock at the door. When Dell answers, there stands Tara, their daughter who disappeared 20 years ago and has long been presumed dead. That’s shaking enough; even more shaking is that she still looks 15, the age she was when she disappeared. When asked where she has been, she spins a tale of world travel that is almost immediately proved to be untrue. But then the story she tells next is so unbelievable that her family comes to think she is either mentally unhinged or a tremendous liar. She was abducted to another world that lies alongside ours, where time runs differently and you can only cross from one world to another at certain times of the year and day. To her, six months had passed instead of the 20 years her family has lived. This world is populated with very untraditional fairies; not tiny gossamer creatures but full sized flesh and blood people who wield dark magic, and, despite first appearances of being sweet, are prone to kidnapping and jealously. The novel is part fantasy and part family drama. Tara’s disappearance changed the lives of her family- Dell, Mary, and her brother, Peter – and of her boyfriend, Richie, who was the main suspect in her disappearance. Dell and Mary went from vital middle aged people to old and frail. Peter and Richie, best friends, didn’t speak for those 20 years. Richie went from musical genius to alcoholic session musician, his life on hold. And as dramatically as Tara’s disappearance changed them all, her reappearance changes them even more. Tara is no longer ‘dead’; she is either a liar or demented, far different things to deal with. They are incredibly happy to see her, but they are furiously angry inside that she left them as she did, and that she is now telling them a bullshit story about fairy land. Is she telling the truth? Is she psychotic? Is she a stone cold liar? The author takes us through the point of view of several characters, allowing us to examine the story from many sides, including that of the eccentric psychiatrist Tara sees and that of her nephew, Jack, who finds himself involved with an old woman whose cat is missed- and who is actually central to the main story. The prose is crisp and clear yet full of rich details, as if a bard were telling the story. It’s a real page turner. My only complaint is with the ending. It seemed to sort of all end in a sudden, inelegant, jumble. The departure from the former style of prose was unsettling and somewhat unsatisfying.
    • 3/5
      On Christmas day, as snow begins to fall for the first time in ten years, there's a knock at the door. A present no one thought to expect has arrived and it brings with it a whirlwind of emotion, mystery, and the heady scent of bluebells.

      Twenty years ago Tara Martin went for a walk in The Outwoods; somewhere, in the midst of its hundred acres of aged birches and yews that lie "trembling on the lip of an ancient volcanic crater" where the very "air is charged with an eerie electrical quality, alternately disturbing and relaxing," Tara disappeared. Her disappearance was followed by turmoil and chaos. Her parents, her brother, and her boyfriend reel from the shock and the emotional eruption devastates all in various ways. As this devastation seethes and froths through the years, making itself known in the various channels a life can take, each character we come to meet in Joyce's Some Kind of Fairy Tale has been brought forth to the precipice of the loss of Tara in one way or another, have experienced some change in themselves because of it.

      Then there's a knock and every assumption, hope, possibility of a miracle that have shaped said precipice are brought to a standstill as Tara arrives on the doorstep with a story of whim inspired travels, a shabby appearance, and a pair of dark glasses.

      Her parents are grateful and protective but her brother has questions. Is this really Tara? Why show up after all this time? Where has she been? Why isn't she telling the truth?

      He's her brother after all, he knows she's holding something back. But what?

      All of this serves Joyce's readers a satisfying mystery in itself. It fits into a ready-made Mystery/Suspense bolthole.

      And yet Joyce goes a bit Shakespeare's Night's Dream and leads us "up and down, up and down..." with the help of some faerie dust and lore so that the mystery at hand is spun out into a complex pattern of mystique, fantasy, psychology, and magical realism.

      I found the interplay between genres to be captivating and refreshing. There were a few parts that didn't go as deep as I would have wanted but, overall, it was a very interesting read. I'd never heard of Joyce prior to this book but his an author I think I'll be looking out for from now on.

      I will say that I both liked and disliked the book's ending. I figured it would be left in the mist a bit but was hoping it would be so far out into the midst so as to leave us quite so puzzled. I think I would have enjoyed Joyce drawing more out from various aspects of the novel. It seemed so cut off in parts which was really the determining factor in my 3 star rating. Love the idea, like the characters, but needed more material. I really wanted to grasp a bit more of Tara's surroundings in this 'Otherworld' - instead the last bit we get from that perspective of things is more acid trip than dimension building. I also wanted more of Tara and Richie. I'm not a big romance person so it's not that I was looking for swooning. I really just wanted to see a psychological/emotional development bloom there; at least one made of deeper stuff than what we experience as the reader. It seemed rushed and that somewhat broke down the atmosphere of the mystique for me.

      As Tara speaks of the bluebells, "Their perfume stole the sense right out of your head. It turned you over and shook the juice right out of you. You couldn't walk between them that year, they were so dense; you had to swim in them. The madness of it! The scent was so subtle that it got all over you, in your nostrils, in your cavities, and on your fingers like the smell of a sweet sin. Didn't it bind you in blue lace and carry you away?" That blissful, plunging prose is what I wanted more of. I wanted prose that rang of sweet sin, that invaded all senses and it seems as if Tara's chapters tease at such a wealth of such ability to allow build and bloom.

      So I hope to see more of said build and bloom in any future Joyce reads. I feel that he has plenty of talent and intriguing ideas to pluck from.
    • 5/5
      Graham Joyce has just become an author that I will be following. This story of a Tara Harris, teenage girl who disappeared in the woods only to return home virtually unchanged twenty years later has totally captured my heart. For two decades, her family and her lover have grieved and their lives were indelibly altered by Tara’s disappearance and yet now she returns telling a story that nobody can believe. Is this a story of something mundane such as kidnapping or is it something entirely different? And what impact does Tara’s return have on those who have struggled for years to come to terms with her absence? Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told me in my childhood than any truth that is taught in life. - Johann SchillerFairy tales were first created not to entertain us, but to teach us. Perhaps Hansel and Gretel was first told to warn children not to wander off in the woods or to accept candy from strangers, but there are other, deeper interpretations of the stories your parents told you as a child. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”It doesn’t take long to realize that Joyce has an abiding love of and fascination for the folklore and mythology of his native British Isles. Tara’s name, for starters, just happens to be that of the ritual seat of the High Kings of Ireland, a place of great mystery and magic. Similarly, I doubt that it is coincidental that her brother Peter, has become a farrier, a shoer of horses, a trade long considered natural magicians for their ability to meld the living and the inanimate. Even the names of the pubs they frequent, the Green Man and the Phantom Coach, reek of dark and powerful folklore. Bottom Line: I loved this book because, from the first page to the last, it is imbued with a sense of the uncanny, am impression that there is something out there beyond our ken that makes the world just a little bit magical.
    • 5/5
      Tara, at age 16, disappears and destroys the lives of those around her. Her family is devastated, her boyfriend is a suspect, the small town is rocked. Twenty years later, she shows up on her parents doorstep on Christmas Day, looking like she hasn't aged very much and constantly wearing dark glasses.I became very entranced by this book. I didn't want to put it down. Was Tara with the mystical people or is she compensating for some horror in her past? I couldn't wait to find out. The characters were very fleshed out. The book was beautifully written. I truly found this a good and charming read.
    • 3/5
      A realistic and beautifully written exploration of what might happen if the tale of Rip Van Winkle (or any of the older stories of people being taken 'Under the Hill') happened in modern-day England.

      Twenty years ago, 16-yr-old Tara disappeared after a fight with her boyfriend. Although the boyfriend was a suspect, nothing was ever proven, and her family was left to mourn and to come to terms with Tara's presumed death.

      Now, Tara has shown up on her parents' doorstep. At first, she gives a sketchy story about having traveled the world for the last 20 years, but soon she tells her brother, Peter, a story of having gone with a handsome man on a white horse, to a Fairyland that resembled a free-love commune, with magic.

      Naturally, Peter convinces her to see a shrink.

      While the book is well done, I personally felt that there was too much psychological analysis and not enough action. I wanted to feel more magic and less mundane, domestic detail. I understand why Joyce made the decisions he did here, I just didn't end up loving the result - although I did like the book.

      The end was well done, with a sense of the inevitable that fits both the spirit of the folklore and the situation set up in the novel.
    • 4/5
      A very well written modern day fairy tale.
      A young girl disappears and then comes back home 20 years later, apparently no older--or is she?
      The people she left behind were destroyed by her disappearance and find it very hard to accept her return, especially when she tells them where she's been. She's obviously got amnesia, or is perhaps lying. She talks to a professional who has a reasonable, psychological explanation for everything she tells him.
      Slowly moving, well constructed tale of lives and relationships changed and destroyed--and something eerie just out of reach, but trying to get in.
    • 4/5
      It's Christmas and family are around, a knock at the door reveals Tara, who disappeared 20 years ago, but she looks just like she did then, her story of being only away for 6 months doesn't ring true and what she tells people sounds outlandish, but being abducted by faerie is a tale often told.The story of the aftermath of going away with the faeries. Interesting and well thought.
    • 4/5
      Twenty years ago Tara Martin went missing. She simply went out one day and never came home. Her boyfriend at the time was an obvious suspect. They had rowed before she disappeared. Her brother and parents have never gotten over it. They’ve moved on as best they can, Peter has a family of his own now, but Tara’s absence casts a long shadow.

      A shadow that her sudden and unexplained reappearance only darkens. Where was she all this time?

      The story she tells her brother, that for her it has only been six months, and they she tried and tried but this was the earliest she could return, does not persuade anybody. There must be some other explanation.

      This book is, in many ways, a perfect read for the Once Upon a Time challenge. It is all about fairy tales and folktales. Joyce starts each chapter with a quote about, or from a fairy tale, and references the case of Bridget Cleary. She was killed by her husband and father, among others, because they believed she was a changeling, the real Bridget having been taken by the fairies.

      And Joyce does a wonderful job of mixing the fairy and the more mundane worlds. There are multiple narrators, sometimes it is Tara telling us what happened, other times her brother or her old boyfriend recount what happened to them. We also get the odd report from her psychiatrist as he attempts to uncover why she has lost her memory and created this outlandish tale.

      It is also a very readable book. I just kept turning the pages, enjoying the read and wanting to find out more. It isn’t perfect however1 . A couple of times while reading I was slightly jolted out of the story by comments made in relation to women. At one stage, for example, one character says something to the effect that nature doesn’t allow two women to live under the same roof. Nothing major, and I do think it was very definitely the character and not Joyce himself who says and believes it, but at the same time I was a bit hmmm.

      And I’m not one hundred per cent sure on the ending.
      But all in all I think this is one of Joyce’s better books and I’d recommend it.
    • 4/5
      Really a fun book - a fairly realistic look at what would happen if someone went missing and then showed up saying they were kidnapped by fairies. The book gets in to what the family went through both during the years she was missing and dealing with her return, the medical and psychological testing - and you're never sure, even at the end, if her story is true or if she only believes it is true. I really enjoyed getting caught up in the story.
    • 5/5
      A psychologically complex story which focuses upon the theme of fairy abduction/abduction and how it affects one family. The reader is never sure of whether Tara's story is true, and indeed she was abducted to "another place" or if she is delusional, and everything can be explained away by psychology and medical excuses--and therein lies what makes this story so brilliant. No spoilers here--but a definite must-read.
    • 5/5
      Yes I gave it 5 stars. I was thoroughly enchanted. I am left with some kind of....longing. I know I am 40 something...but...I believe. I believe. I believe. I will now hunt down every book by Graham Joyce and read it.
    • 4/5
      Loved this one. First book by Joyce and will definitely be reading his others.
    • 4/5
      The quote from Lord Dunsanay at the start of Chp. 42 lays it all out for us. "I've gone away to the fairy people / I shall not come to the town again. / You may see a girl with my face and tresses / You may see one come to my mother's door / Who may speak my words and may wear my dresses. / She will not be I, for I come no more". This novel tells the story of Tara, a girl who returns home 20 years after she went missing, claiming that she went away with the fairies. A wonderful, realistic take on what it would be like if that could really happen--and a reminder that none of us are who we were when we were young. I highly recommend Graham Joyce, especially if you like the work of Charles de Lint.
    • 4/5
      On Christmas Day, Tara Martin appears on her parents’ front doorstep. This would not have been at all strange, had she not been missing for twenty years. And also had she not looked a day over 15, the age she was when she disappeared.Those of you who grew up with a certain kind of story can probably guess what happened to Tara from those three sentences alone. And you’d be right.But the beauty of Some Kind of Fairy Tale lies not in treating Tara’s time in the fairy world as a plot twist, but in presenting it to the modern world and asking that world, “Well. What do you make of this, then?”This would have been more interesting had there been a greater variety of answers to the question in the book itself. As it is, the majority of people whom Tara comes across think that she is in her mid-thirties and for whatever reason suppressing the fact that she’s been missing for twenty years. Initially both possibilities seem equally plausible, but as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear that Tara actually did make a journey; everyone in her family’s world simply cannot accept it. By the end it felt as though the story had become a modern-day middle-class morality play (to wit: Tara complains that the light has gone out of Peter and Richie, that they were the hope and the future, but they have succumbed to modernity like everyone else). This frustrated me, as it felt like Joyce could have made much more of the story – he certainly has the skill for it, and his prose is beautiful, but I felt like the contrasts drawn between the fairy world and the real world became heavy-handed and even a bit unfair.It’s the sub-plots initiated by Tara’s return which made this book so much fun for me to read. Tara’s sudden reappearance, and all the joys and problems which come along with it, profoundly shake up the lives of everyone around her. Way back when, her brother and parents had blamed her boyfriend, Richie, for her disappearance. Peter and Richie went from being best friends to not speaking for twenty years. Now they’re back in each other’s lives, and seeing Peter with his family as well as talking to Tara makes Richie drastically reconsider his lifestyle. Another sub-plot, involving Peter’s son, next-door-neighbour Mrs Larwood, and Mrs Larwood’s cat, begins tragically but quickly becomes probably the most adorable in the whole novel. I really enjoy old ladies in novels who know a great deal more than they let on; Joyce reveals her character by subtle degrees, and I would have loved to have seen much more of her. In contrast, though, I felt that the development of the fairy culture occurred much less deftly; Tara goes from hating being there to nostalgic without there really being very much in between, which made it difficult for me to sympathize with her or even find her much more than a petulant teenager. This was a shame, since I found the world enthralling, and would have liked to experience it through…someone else’s eyes. Therein lies the great strength of Joyce’s novel: each of his characters, even Mr and Mrs Martin the elder and Peter’s daughters, characters who receive comparatively little attention, feel like individuals, like people. Not even the psychologist or the fairies feel like stock characters. Every single one has their own desires and motives, and every single one changes develops throughout the course of the novel. Perhaps somewhat ironically I felt that Tara actually developed the least, but she did grow to a sort of acceptance of her circumstances, something which I greeted more with disgruntled relief than joy. Overall, though, between the strong characters and the strong prose, I enjoyed Some Kind of Fairy Tale, and would recommend it, particularly to the fairy-tale-inclined.
    • 4/5
      I picked up this book on a whim to read from the library. It sounded interesting so I started reading it right away. I really enjoyed the writing style in this book. It was clear cut and simple, yet elegant. This was also the type of fantasy book that wasn’t action heavy. It was more about telling a story and seeing the repercussions of that story being told. The reader gets bits and pieces of what happened to Tara for all these years as the story goes along. It felt like sitting on a park bench with the fog and mist all around you. You can’t see much at first and you have this strange tingling sensation on the back of your neck but as time rolls by you start to relax and the fog goes away. Except for that one spot, way in the back that you know is there but you’re too afraid to look at it.I really enjoyed the story as it talked about the fine line between reality and fantasy. It’s all about perspective and I like that this book was very open ended. You could either believe Tara and her stories or you could believe that she had a trauma and blocked out all that time that has passed. By the end of the novel I wasn’t sure what to believe. I wanted to believe Tara but there was a small part of me that still doubts it all. That’s what I really liked about this book.I highly recommend it and I definitely want to look into Joyce’s other works.
    • 4/5
      Joyce writes well, and this is a clever take on the fairy abduction trope.A young girl disappears in the early 1990s and returns to her family strangely unchanged in the present day. She believes she has been away for 6 months, tricked into remaining in the realm of faerie by a plausible man who did not force her, but did not tell her the whole truth either. For them, and for the boyfriend accused of her murder, it has been 20 years of anguish and struggle. The strain of return is managed well - is she mad? Is she lying? Is she culpable? And the working out of pain, joy, resentment and helplessness is both believable and moving. I was slightly disappointed that no one quoted Professor Quirke from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe ('have you considered that she may be telling the truth?'), but that aside this is a very enjoyable and skillful update.
    • 3/5
      At 16, Tara Martin disappears. She appears 20 years later on Christmas Day, seemingly having not aged and telling a hallucinatory tale of having been held captive by the Fairies – not the wispy wee folk, and not the malevolent spirits of many English folk tales, but, well, a different kind of Fairy. Naturally, everyone assumes she’s nuts, including her parents, her brother Peter, her boyfriend Ritchie and her oddball psychoanalyst.It is a very fast read and a pretty good story, but could have been fleshed out more. The episodes set in Fairyland were tantalizing but too sketchy. The story on the human side was okay, especially a subplot involving a young boy, a dead cat, and the cat’s eccentric owner. My chief problem with the book was that Tara herself was a nullity. I would think that a stint in Fairyland would make a person interesting, but no such luck.
    • 4/5
      Twenty years ago, at the age of not-quite-sixteen, Tara disappeared in the woods. Now she has reappeared as mysteriously as she vanished, looking a little different but not much older. She claims that she rode off with a man, or a being -- she never uses the word "fairy," but everyone else does -- to some place outside our world, and believes she was gone only six months. Is she telling the literal truth, or is it all some fantasy her mind has manufactured to cope with whatever actually happened? And is she even quite the same person she was when she left?Personally, I've read enough fantasy that I found her version of events easier to accept than the more psychobabbly explanations, but the story does play around with the ambiguity in some interesting ways. And I think there's something about this novel that's deceptively simple. Taken one way, it's a nicely done little story in which ancient folklore is updated to the modern day in a way that asks what it would be like for someone to have that kind of experience and then come back afterward to the real, mundane, modern world and to real, messy human relationships. But I think there's something deeper under there, too, something a little more elusive, something about what those old stories symbolize and mean. Either way, it was an interesting read.
    • 4/5
      At first I had difficulty getting into this book, I had almost decided to put it down. But then, it came to life in my hands and I couldn't put it down. There were a few references to words I didn't think needed to be written in, but I overlooked those words and enjoyed the book.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book I've read by Graham Joyce, but it won't be last. A classic tale of a child stolen by faerie and then returned, this novel will keep you reading and reading until the bitter end. All the elements are there - a mystery, a missing person returned, time and history elided and rediscovered. At times this book is so creepy it gets right underneath your skin and this is one of its strengths. I wasn't terribly fond of the descriptions of faerie and that's probably okay because whether or not that's the key to what happened remains unclear and this makes the entire experience mysterious and wonderful.
    • 4/5
      Another one. I mean, another good sink-your-teeth-in book. I read this one in a matter of hours.Christmas Day, Tara returns home. Tara's been gone for 20 years but, upon her return, has hardly aged at all. She looks tired, maybe wiser, but otherwise, she appears to be a 36-year-old in the body of a 16-year-old. The story is told from various perspectives. When Tara is telling her story, it is from her perspective, though the listener varies between her brother Peter, her ex-boyfriend Richie, and her shrink Vivian (Mr. Vivian Underwood). Tara's story is the heart of it -- what events led up to her disappearance, where she was, what has happened since she has been back.Sometimes the story is in first person, sometimes in third. Sometimes the author uses quotes to indicate conversation, sometimes merely logic (e.g., He told me, don't do that). Joyce uses a variety of quotes to intro his chapters, which quotes set the mood for the chapter and the perspective, the best of which are a transcription of the trial of Michael Cleary for the murder of his wife Bridget Cleary.The book is well paced and pulls you through. I really didn't put it down until I was done. I was impressed with the way Joyce implemented the various perspectives and thought his voice was largely convincing for most if not all of the characters. I particularly enjoyed Dr. Underwood's report, perspectives, conversations.The first 50 or so pages aren't the best in the book. It almost feels like a little too much set up before we get to "the goods." I didn't think I really loved the ending, either, but I felt like I understood the reasoning behind it. Then, upon further reflection, I was very impressed with the window that was left open. It was all cinched up *just* enough to keep you wondering about absolutely all of it. Which I am surprisingly very happy about because I normally like nice, neat packages.I definitely recommend the book. It falls somewhere between magical realism and fantasy. It's interesting and well told. And best of all, it's a real novel.
    • 4/5
      First I just love the way he writes, intelligently but infinitely readable. A young woman goes missing, her boyfriend at the time is presumed guilty but it cannot be proven, she reappears twenty years later with an unbelievable story. Her parents and brother send her to a psychiatrist to see if she is mentally ill. Enjoyed the character of the crusty old psychiatrist, but my favorite character was Richie. The author does a fantastic job with this character, showing how his growth was stunted because of these unproven accusations and how he actually somewhat quit living twenty years ago as well. Sometimes things are just unbelievable, but the author makes us question this. Could these outlandish stories just sometimes be true?
    • 5/5
      When Tara Martin reappears on her parents’ doorstep twenty years after her mysterious disappearance from the ancient Outwoods forest, no one really believes her story that she was “away with the faeries” for six months with no memory beyond that. Although she hasn’t aged physically at all, the family and a noted psychiatrist whom Tara agrees to see all believe there are medical and psychological explanations for her loss of memory and arrested physical development. But who is right? As readers are told from the beginning, “. . . everything depends on who is telling the story. It always does.”With equal parts mystery and magic, Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a beguiling blend of realistic fiction and well-researched folk lore that could be called realistic fantasy. Whatever you call it, Tara’s story will enchant and haunt you long after you’ve closed the covers.