Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
”As for playing with time, Richie, not even in your wildest dreams have you been where I’ve been. And believe me, if you go there, if you have your eyes burned open, only love can bring you back, and I came back for you.
…“But there are far more significant things. How to see for the first time. There are forces, Richie. You can train yourself to see them. There are sounds just beyond the range of normal hearing, and you can train yourself to hear them. But here you blunt all your capacities with greed and booze and dope”
- from Some Kind of Fairy Tale
Some Kind of Fairy Tale, despite the deceptive title, is not a novel for children, though it would probably have cross-over appeal for teens.
It’s about a teenaged girl, Tara Martin, who disappears from an area called “the Outwoods:” a creepy, gothic sort of place you’d expect danger to linger. Even the trees are menacing, pressing in with almost suffocating darkness, just as quickly transforming back to a lovely, lush natural area filled with the intense smell of springtime bluebells – intoxicating, almost oppressive flowers. It’s as if the forest is alive; in some ways, it is.
Tara goes missing immediately after an argument with her boyfriend, on the day she told him she was pregnant. Unable to stand arguing further, upset at his insistence she keep the baby and the two get married, Tara runs away from Richie, winding up deep in the woods. It isn’t that she doesn’t feel she loves her boyfriend; rather, she wants more from her life than having a child as a teenager, settling down for a life of relative poverty.
Because her boyfriend was the last person to see her, he’s naturally under suspicion. Among other incriminating clues, a ring he had given her is found on top of a mossy rock above the area they had gone to talk, smashed bluebells the telltale sign this was where they’d met. While admitting they were in the woods talking, which lead to an argument, what Richie didn’t tell the police was Tara had just told him she was pregnant. Later, when the police investigation finds she’d aborted child, his attempted cover up gives him a possible motive for wanting her out of the way.
Twenty years later, out of the blue, Tara shows up at her parents’ doorstep. It’s Christmas Day and her parents had just sat down to dinner, their daughter having been gone so long the idea of her didn’t even cross their minds. The shock of seeing Tara causes her mother to faint and no wonder, though her father’s first reaction is a sort of shocked joy.
Strangely, she looks no older than when she left at around age 16, despite the fact she’s now 26. At first she tells them she’s been traveling around the world, which seems to fit with her ragged, unkempt appearance. She does this to buy herself time, so she can settle in and get her thoughts in order.
When she’s eventually ready to tell her story, which she knows they won’t believe, that’s when the plot really kicks into gear. She tells them she’d been abducted by a man, a sort of fairy (though they disliked being called that), taken to another world. What parent would believe that? Seriously?!
Her parents immediately put her in therapy, thinking she’s obviously lost her mind or is suffering from some sort of amnesia. But she continues to insist the tale she tells is true. Is she delusional or did it really happen? Where has she been for the past twenty years and why has she not aged?
Read the book and find out…
