Fair Peril [Mass Market Paperback]

Nancy Springer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1997

Buffy -- a fat, fortyish, divorced mother -- encounters a talking frog and, ignoring the warnings of fairy tales, does not turn the frog back into a prince. Trouble ensues when Buffy's rebellious teenage daughter Emily does kiss the frog; soon she and handsome Prince Adamus disappear into the enchanted land of Fair Peril. It is up to Buffy to rescue Emily and, in the process, learn that magic does exist in the most ordinary of lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like Springer's earlier book, Larque on the Wing, this is an eccentric, charming fantasy that combines fairy tale with a smack of satire. On the first anniversary of her divorce, storyteller Buffy Murphy heads to the woods for some well-deserved solitude and creative inspiration. What she never imagined is that this inspiration would come in the shape of a talking frog who claims to be Prince Adamus d'Aurca. All he needs is a kiss, he says, and the curse he received from the queen of Fair Peril will be broken. Buffy has no intention of kissing a frog, but sees great storytelling possibilities, so she takes him home. To Buffy's dismay, her teenage daughter Emily kisses Adamus, turning him into a beautiful prince. The two then run off to Fair Peril?a land accessed through, of all places, the local mall. What follows is a rollicking, outrageous modern tale of make-believe as Buffy and her friend, a gay librarian named Levon, travel back and forth between the real world and Fair Peril to save Emily from the jealous queen. Storytelling, Buffy soon discovers, is the key to power in Fair Peril, a power that may retrieve her daughter and her own sense of self. Springer has created a hilarious blend of feminism and fantasy in this heartfelt story of the power of a mother's love.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

While walking beside a Pennsylvania pond, storyteller Buffy Murphy--flabby, dowdy, fortysomething--encounters a talking frog: Prince Adamus d`Aurca, who was ensorcelled (``trans-frogrified'') a thousand years ago by the coldhearted Queen of Fair Peril (Faerie) for refusing to become her lover. Yet Buffy, still trying to come to terms with her toad of an ex-husband, wannabe politician Prentis and his new Trophy Wife, Tempestt, is reluctant to kiss Adamus and thus return him to human form. Instead she consults her friend, the gay, leather-clad librarian LeeVon, who finds her a useful book (he produced them magically from blank templates; the contents change according to the needs of the reader). There, Buffy finds a spell that she accidentally activates to trans-frogrify LeeVon; being gay, he has to find a man to kiss him. With another slight mistake, Buffy turns Prentis into a frog. Then her rebellious, scornful teenage daughter, Emily, kisses Adamus, who becomes a stunningly beautiful man--and Emily's slave; together they run off to the ``Mall Tifarious,'' where a small shift in perception brings them into the Realm of Fair Peril--whose single- minded Queen has no intention of giving up Adamus. Witty, whimsical, and enormously appealing, if lacking the thoughtful underpinning that made Larque on the Wing (1994) such a delight. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 246 pages
• Publisher: Avon Books (Mm) (July 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380794306
• ISBN-13: 978-0380794300
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,480,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist." I have a rubber stamp declaring those words, and they pretty much delineate my life. Conforming was the thing to do when I was raised, in the fifties. Even my mother, who spent her days painting animal portraits at an easel in the corner of the kitchen, tried to conform via housecleaning, bridge parties, and a new outfit every spring. My father, who was born into a British-mannered Protestant family in southern Ireland, emigrated to America as a young man and idolized the "melting pot" because at last he fit in. Once in a rare while he recited "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" or told a tale of a leprechaun, but most of the time he was an earnest naturalized American who expected exemplary behavior of his children. My mother was a charming Pollyanna who would not entertain negative sentiments in herself or anyone around her. As their only girl and the baby of the family, I was coddled, yet hardly ever got a chance to be other than excruciatingly good.

My "conform" phase lasted right into adulthood. When I was thirteen, my parents bought a small motel near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and I spent most of my teen years helping them make beds and clean rooms. I did not date until I went to college -- Gettysburg College, all of seven miles from home. it was the height of the sixties, and I grew my hair long, but eschewed pot, protests, and "happenings." Instead, I married a preacher's son who was himself conforming by studying for the ministry. Within a few years I was Rev. Springer's wife, complete with offspringers, living in a country parsonage in southern York County, PA.

Here beginneth the "go crazy" phase.

Because I had never been allowed any negative emotions, I began to hear "voices" in my head. First they whispered "divorce" (not permissible), and later they hissed "suicide". They scared me silly. I couldn't sleep; images of knives and torture floated in front of my eyes even during the daytime; something roared like an animal inside my ears; my wrists hurt; I saw blood seeping out of the walls; panic jolted me like a cattle goad out of nowhere. Is it necessary to add that I was clinically depressed? The doctor gave me Valium and sent me to a shrink. The shrink took me off the Valium and told me I had a problem with anger. (No duh.) The next doctor zombied me on the numbing antidepressants which were available at that time. The next shrink said I had an adjustment problem. And so on, for several years, during which I somehow managed to stay alive, take care of my kids, handle the vagaries of my husband, sew clothing and grow vegetables to get by financially, cook, can preserves, show up at church, do mounds of laundry and publish "The White Hart" and "The Silver Sun"--yet not one of the doctors of shrinks ever suggested that I might be a strong person, let alone a writer. All of them were intent on "helping" poor little me "adjust" to being a housewife, mother, and pastor's wife.

Eventually I became resigned to the fact (as I perceived it) that I was an evil, sinful person with horrible things going on inside my head, and I stopped trying to fix me. I stopped going to doctors or therapists. Somehow I found courage--or desperation--to stop trying to conform or adjust or live a role.

"I am going to start taking an hour or two first thing in the morning to do my writing," I said to my husband.

"Fine," he said. He had reached the point where he would agree with whatever to humor the neurotic wife; to him it was just another of my brain farts. But to me it was the most important sentence I ever spoke. With that statement I stopped being a housewife who sometimes stole time to write, and I started being a writer.

Conform, go crazy--or become an artist.

By becoming a writer--by becoming who I truly was--I became well.

It was so simple. Although it did take years, of course; it takes a long time for good things to grow. Trees. Books. Me. Odd thing about books; they not only nourish growth but show it happening. In "The Black Beast, The Golden Swan" and many other of my early novels, you can see me dealing with the yang/yin nature of good and evil, struggling to accept my own shadow. In "Chains of Gold" and "The Hex Witch of Seldom" I start writing as a woman, no longer identifying only with male main characters. In a number of children's books I come to terms with my own childhood. And in "Apocalypse"--whoa, what a fierce, dark fantasy novel, the first thing I wrote after my income from writing enabled my husband to leave the ministry. I hadn't thought of myself as repressed when I was a pastor's wife, but obviously something broke loose when I shed that role. "Larque on the Wing"--whoa again, another breakthrough book that spiraled straight out of my muddled middle-aged psyche and took me places I'd never dreamed were in me.

It's been a long time since those days when I thought I was an evil person. I know better now, and I love and trust me even to the extent of writing "Fair Peril"--a more perilous novel than I knew at the time, interfacing all too closely with my life. Written two years before the fact, it foresees my husband's infidelity and my divorce. The most painful irony I've ever faced is that once I gained my selfhood, I lost my lifelong partner. He had supported me through episodes that would have sent most men screaming and running, but once I became well and strong, he transferred his loyalty to a skinny, neurotic waif all to similar to the young woman I once was. After supporting him through twenty-seven years of stinky socks, automotive yearnings, miscellaneous foibles, and the career change that put him where she could cry on his shoulder, I found this a bit hard to take. But I wouldn't go back to being Ms. Pitiful. Not for anything.

Now married to a rather remarkable second husband, after living 46 years in Pennsylvania I moved in 2007 to the Florida panhandle, where I spent a year living in a small apartment above the aforementioned husband's hangar in an exceedingly rural (swamps, egrets, snakes and alligators) airport. Now we have a real house about a mile from the airport on higher ground featuring tremendously tall longleaf pine trees with rattlesnakes and scorpions underneath them. Life is an adventure and I mean that sincerely.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "We don't have princes here. We don't even have Kennedys.", January 17, 2003

By 

Kelly (Fantasy Literature) (Columbia, MO United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Fair Peril (Mass Market Paperback)

Both riotously funny and sweetly touching, _Fair Peril_ is a fun and wonderful fantasy novel. It's set in modern times, in a sort of "Anytown, USA"--where the shopping mall is a portal into Fairyland, and anything can happen.

It all begins when Buffy Murphy discovers a talking frog who claims to be a prince. Buffy is a divorced and overweight woman, down on her luck, who holds down a practical job in a fake food factory and is a storyteller on the side. Hoping a gimmick will make her storytelling more sought-after, she takes the frog home...and has no plans to kiss it and turn it back into a prince. Enter her teenage daughter. When the frog prince and 16-year-old Emily run away together, Buffy has to find them and rescue Emily from the story she's been caught up in. Buffy finds herself in a world where a star-spangled nightgown renders you a wizard, where misspelling your spell can have disastrous results, and where the blue ogres lurking around the corner might be mundane cops, ready to haul you off to the local mental health center. I won't summarize the plot from here, because it would make no sense if I tried to recount it in this space. But it's a fun and wild ride. In the end, Buffy learns that no story is set in stone, and it's never too late to start all over with "once upon a time".

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fairy tale with an adult twist., October 9, 2002

By 

Sue "Book Junkie" (Lancaster County, Pa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fair Peril (Paperback)

I'll be honest, I picked up this book at a used book store while waiting for a friend to finish shopping. I started the first paragraph in the store, bought the book cause I couldn't bear not reading more of it and ended up spending the rest of the day wrapped up in the pages. I loved this book.
The heroine is a women my age (you don't get many of those), and of my build (you never get those) and she ends up saving the day and herself. If you enjoy stories that are a little of the real world with an over-lap of the fantasy, you will love this.
This is the first book of Nancy Springers that I have read, but I can assure you that I will be searching for more of them. She is funny (laugh out loud funny) but also a little pensive and thought provoking. If you're looking for a fairy tale with a little nasty adult twist, don't miss this.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent fantasy novel, March 24, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Fair Peril (Paperback)

I had never read anything by this author, but I saw that Marion Zimmer Bradley highly recommended it, so I figured it would be worth a shot. This is an amazing novel. It takes you into a world that is disorderly and full of chaos, and shows you more about the nature of people than you would expect from a fantasy novel. Excellent, heart wrenching at times, and Springer's style of writing makes the whole episode very believeable.