Graham Joyce

After missing for twenty years, Tara Martin appears on her parents doorstep barely a day older than when she vanished.

A Novel

Some Kind of Fairy Tale

Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a very English story. A story of woods and clearings, a story of folk tales and family histories. It is as if Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris had written a Fairy Tale together. It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phonecall from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery. He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she's back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim. But her stories don't quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young women who walked out the door twenty years ago. Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara's one time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her. A haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family...

Janice Hopper

I really liked this book. It was my first Graham Joyce book, but it won't be my last!

I've been on an other worlds/adjacent worlds kick lately. There's Mythago Wood, where the other world is generated by a bit of primeval woodland. In King of Morning, Queen of Day, the other world springs from the powerful imagination of a young woman. In Some Kind of Fairy Tale, we're left almost to the end of the book before we know if there even IS really an adjacent/faery world. 

It's the story of Tara, who may (or may not) have been carried away by a fairy man. She spends 6 subjective months in a sort of "Elfland" and then returns, only to find that 20 years have passed in our world. The working out of what happened to Tara, and how her return affects her and her family is explored in interesting ways. And we learn that you don't have to be carried away by the fairies to have 20 years of your life lost living in a dream. Good stuff. 

I listened to the audio version read by John Lee. He's an excellent narrator, and handles the different voices well. The Scribd audiobook app continues to be a bit problematic when you're offline.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale A Novel

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