Some Kind of Fairy Tale: A Novel [Hardcover]

Graham Joyce (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 10, 2012

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Here is a keenly observed tale of a family in crisis, one that mixes fantasy and psychiatry in a potent cocktail.”
Stephen King: The Best Books I Read in 2012, Entertainment Weekly

"Joyce’s ravishing novel is about disruption and grief, about the risks of being charmed or stolen away from what we love. Though he draws faithfully on English folklore, Joyce has clearly gone beyond book-learning and made the “crossing at twilight” to the fairy kingdom himself. His writing is enthralling, agile and effortless."
New York Times

“Graham Joyce's new novel Some Kind of Fairy Tale is one of the most impressive fantasy books we've read in ages…. Graham Joyce has obviously steeped himself in fairy-tale lore, and his attention to detail (and to the significance of those details) is pretty astonishing. But what really makes Some Kind of Fairy Tale stand head and shoulders above most other fantasy novels I've read lately is the strong focus on the characters. Joyce's slow, careful narrative style draws you in to a story that's as much a family drama as it is a magical adventure…. Joyce takes a steady, masterful approach that explores one simple story from every angle, holding it up to the light until we see the hidden images revealed by each separate facet. Joyce has written a brilliant book that will make you think about the meaning of fairytales in a new way.”
io9.com

“Ultimately, it isn’t Joyce’s clever self-awareness that pushes Fairy Tale into the stratosphere. It’s the way he weaves these twisty ideas into a straightforward, achingly resonant story of a broken man who’s found his long-lost sister. His prose and dialogue, even more than usual, are carved with balance, clarity, and subtlety. As a writer, Joyce is often praised as “unsentimental.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. Sentiment underscores everything in Fairy Tale, from Tara’s struggle to establish her sanity to the heartsick people who loved who she was—and are trying to love what she’s become. That sentiment, though, is rarely precious, and it never comes cheap. As its title trumpets, Some Kind Of Fairy Tale meditates on the nature of what it means to tell stories. But wisely and hauntingly, it does so through a spellbinding story of its own.” (grade A)
A.V. Club

“Joyce’s fiction is an unusual—and unusually satisfying—hybrid. He’s interested in all the things that preoccupy literary novelists: finely drawn characters, the beauty and sadness of life’s inevitable transitions, families in all their ambiguous and endlessly fascinating complexity. His prose is precise and unsentimental. Yet into the fabric of these relationships he weaves elements of folklore and myth, which he presents both as real and as manifestations of primal aspects of the human experience.”
Salon.com

“Haunting, brilliant…Few writers today can match Joyce in evoking the beauty of that delicate balance, in conveying the fantasy of ordinary life or the ordinariness of the fantastic. People, pay attention.”
Gary K. Wolfe, Locus

"Dark and haunting."
The Free Lance–Star

“Absorbing…Keep an open mind.”
Kirkus

"Fans of novels featuring dark, haunted woods, overgrown English moors and changelings hidden in the dense brush will be absolutely delighted by the hypnotizing mystery of Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale. Joyce opens with the promising setup of a returned, thought-for-dead protagonist, blending reality with imagination as he explores what really happened to Tara Martin."
Bookpage

"Reading [Some Kind of Fairy Tale] by Graham Joyce is a little like stepping into an enormous, brilliantly camouflaged mantrap. At first, you don't even realize what's happened. Then, slowly, you discover that he has drawn you into a strange, dreamlike place, and you can't leave, even if doing so simply means closing the book. Not that you'd want to. Joyce's books are as seductive as anything you'll find in contemporary fiction."
Richmond Times-Dispatch

"In sum, Some Kind of Fairy Tale is fantastically formed, complete with a gently portentous premise, a marvellous cast of characters, and a narrative as smart and self-reflexive as it is at first old-fashioned. Enigmatic and intellectual, yes, yet readily accessible and massively satisfying, Joyce’s latest is a joy."
Tor.com

"Reality and fairy tale are beautifully interwoven in this contemplative story about relationships, love, and dreams. In a unique blend of thriller and fantasy, Joyce creates a delightful page-turner that his fans and newcomers alike will find hard to put down." 
Booklist

About the Author

GRAHAM JOYCE, a winner of the O. Henry Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award, lives in Leicester, England, with his family. His books include The Silent Land, Smoking Poppy, Indigo (a New York Times Notable Book of 2000), The Tooth Fairy (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998), and Requiem, among others.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (July 10, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780385535786
• ISBN-13: 978-0385535786
• ASIN: 0385535783
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.7 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (112 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #126,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Some Kind of Wonderful June 20, 2012

By Diana F. Von Behren TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

What can I say about a Graham Joyce novel that I haven't said before? Joyce has never ceased to entertain me with his eclectic and adept ability to blend fantasy and reality together in a way that is not only believable, but incandescent. In "Some Kind of Fairy Tale," his skill as a storyteller seems to flow effortlessly, meandering here and there, revealing snippets of the lives of people growing older, whose dreams have not quite withered on the vine of experience and quotidian living, but have weathered, hardened and metamorphosed into something a bit different from youthful expectations.

Within this slowly changing landscape live Peter, his wife Genevieve, and his children. During the halcyon days of young adulthood, Peter considers working in the field of psychology, but when doubt and disappointment flicker through his mind like a dark shadow he decides instead to become a blacksmith.

Over twenty years before, he and his best mate Richie cease being friends. His sixteen-year-old sister Tara whom Richie loves with a passionate and jealous abandon disappears while walking through the woods and their parents and the authorities look upon Richie as the prime suspect.

Now seemingly from out of nowhere, Tara returns looking frazzled but not a day older from that moment twenty years earlier when she entered the wood. Her explanation borders on the delusional; she was abducted by one of the little people--a handsome fairy who took her to a place far away in an adjacent reality where time is measured differently. As far as she is concerned only six months have passed.

Mixed emotions of relief, incredulity and anger catapult her family and in particular Peter into a mode of defensiveness that no amount of recounting can erode. Was she abducted? Had an ordinary man hurt her in some way and forced her mind into conjuring up a fairy tale that she could accept without loosing her sanity? Did she simply run away to avoid some unpleasantness occurring to her at the time? Does she expect her family and Richie to acknowledge her feeble explanation so that she could avoid an ultimate accountability? Or is her story true?

Expertly, Joyce weaves the voices of Tara, Richie, Peter and others into a chorus of disbelieving hope as they attempt to piece together what happened in the past and the effect it has on the present and future. His telling of small things--everyday events that register the routine conditions the reader to trust his narrators even when they lead him/her to places not so familiar and decidedly more sinister. As in the tale of Hansel and Gretel, the beautiful suddenly shifts just slightly and an ugly reality threatens to expose the true machinations alive in the mind of the witch and the lengths the innocent will go to resurrect themselves.

Joyce's command of portraying the British countryside and the colloquial speech of its natives aids in crafting a tale that shimmers in and out of that other dimension where such folk as fairies might live. He depicts his population of little people with the same dire respect as Marion Zimmer Bradley in her novel "The Mists of Avalon" and Keith Donohue's The Stolen Child. Joyce lulls one into belief and no question goes unanswered by the novel's last page.

Bottom line? Graham Joyce's "Some Kind of Fairy Tale" does not disappoint. Although other novels have attempted to utilize the theme of fairy abduction and the psychology of those who disappear from conventional life with some degree of limited success (I call to mind Jennifer McMahon's Don't Breathe a Word: A Novel), Joyce manages to suspend disbelief, create a small world that hinges on a small amount of people and nudge the reader into that space that is east of the sun west of the moon without protest. Immensely readable, "Some Kind of Fairy Tale" will have you wishing Joyce was more prolific. Highly recommended.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful and deeply moving book May 23, 2012

By A. J Terry VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Twenty years ago, the lovely, charming, sixteen-year-old Tara Martin disappeared in a remnant of English primeval forest. Her parents were distraught, hundreds of searchers combed the area, and the police arrested her budding-rock-musician boyfriend Richie on suspicion of murder. Then without warning, Tara shows up at her parents' door on Christmas Day looking thin, dirty--and still sixteen. Of course her parents and her now-middle-aged brother Peter ask where she's been. Tara claims she met a man on a white horse, who asked her to ride away with him to the place most people call Fairyland. She was there for only six months, but the world she returned to has aged twenty years.

Much of the suspense in Some Kind of Fairy Tale centers around where Tara has really been, and even whether she's really Tara. She's sent to a dentist who confirms her identity--but also her age of sixteen. She's sent for a physical examination and a brain scan, but she's healthy. She's sent to an elderly, eccentric psychiatrist called Vivian Underwood to whom she narrates her experiences, since almost no one else will listen. The experiences are at once beautiful and frightening, awe inspiring and base--Joyce uses folklore as an anchor rather than merely repeating it. Underwood diagnoses amnesia and some delusional system (he can't decide on the label) that both conceals and symbolizes the cruel but more ordinary abuse he assumes that Tara is suppressing. Her parents and brother accept his diagnosis, but their relief and tolerance soon give way to irritation because Tara doesn't conform to their lower-middle-class conventions of behavior. Richie, however, still loves and accepts Tara unconditionally, and she's pulling him out of the emotional and musical slump he's been in for years.

Other characters include Peter and his wife Genevieve's large and rowdy family of children, and an elderly neighbor called Mrs. Larwood, who is more relevant to the plot than at first appears.

The other part of the suspense centers around not where Tara has been, but where she will decide to go next. To reveal this would be a spoiler, but I can say that the ending is both deeply poignant and healing. At its core, this book is an exploration of personal identity, membership in a family/community/relationship, and the tensions between the individual and others. Joyce tries to leave open the puzzle of whether Tara's account of her experiences is factual (fantasy) or merely symbolizes something more mundane. This increases the sense of wonder but left me knowing where I stand on the issue.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Feelings For This Fairy Tale June 18, 2012

By Leah

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Tara Martin disappeared more than a decade ago. She left behind her distraught parents, haunted boyfriend Richie, and her hurting younger brother Peter. Now, years later, Tara has come back. And her whereabouts have everyone questioning what's real what isn't. Tara claims that she has been away with the fairies in their world.

SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE had a wonderful idea: is Tara's story true? Is there really a fairy world? I love ambiguous fantasy, and this book definitely had that. I was left wondering if I had just had the wool pulled over my eyes constantly, which I like. Graham Joyce's language is beautiful and descriptive; he uses it to create England and the supposed fairy world unique.

However, I had some problems dealing with the pacing and the actions of the characters. The book takes its time to let the characters come into their own. We see Tara and Peter's parents interactions with each other, then how they interact with their children. We see how Peter interacts with his wife and their children, all while dealing with Tara's arrival. Also, Tara narrates a few chapters to explain her side of the story. Because of this, the pacing feels anticlimactic. The switch in narration was disorienting.

I am in the minority when it comes to this book. While beautifully written, it was easy for me to put this down or skip ahead to see how certain characters dealt with their feeling toward Tara. For a select audience.