MixedThe Michigan DailyIt takes King a long time to actually get to the meat of the story. Two hundred pages with the relative mundanity of Sentry, Ill. leaves you only 400 or so pages to spend in the land of Empis, the alternate world that lies at the bottom of a winding set of stone steps inside that weird shed in Mr. Bowditch’s yard. As soon as we enter Empis with Charlie, you can’t help but wonder why on Earth (get it?) we spent so much time in Illinois when there was a world with giants, talking crickets, curses, reanimated skeletons, two moons and magical butterflies lurking just beneath our feet ... King, as usual, succeeds in creating a sense of wonder and curiosity in his readers. His creations of both people and places have an internal logic in which even magic makes sense. As a storyteller, we never doubt him for a moment. The characters of Fairy Tale both satisfy and surprise us with their wholeness; Empis feels just as real as Illinois ... Even looking past the somewhat awkward pacing of how long it takes for Charlie to switch worlds, King, unfortunately, seems to fall back on a trope that is all too common in horror — equating facial disfigurement or limb differences with being scary and/or pitiful ... Yes, the disability-as-horror trope did color my opinion of Fairy Tale. If you’ve never read Stephen King, this wouldn’t be my first recommendation...But for those who enjoy King’s quick-witted prose, fast-paced action and mind-bending ideations, Fairy Tale. won’t disappoint.
Bud Smith
RaveThe Michigan Daily... encapsulates the specific and peculiar feeling of what if I just drove off, away from my life, with no real destination? stretched out for nearly 400 pages. It is a romp through the crisscrossing American highways and equally twisted minds of two teenagers...Their stories, both individual and intertwined, are sad from the very beginning, tinged with just enough desperation that \'leaving it all behind\' seems a little more plausible than it does for the rest of us ... At first, from its description on the back, I was worried this novel was going to be another rose-colored-glasses, romanticized-open-road, driving-with-the-windows-down epic, with a rambling plot and long descriptions of the pastoral beauty of America. I was so wrong. Right from the beginning, this book warns you that it won’t fall into those tropes, and if it does, you’re right to be suspicious ... Smith manages to capture the innocence and idiocy of teenagerdom, while showing that trauma can make people grow up too fast ... The main characters are unbelievable — they’re just written a little too wildly to really ring true. But in a way, that makes them all the more real. Even just three years out of my teenage years, I already feel like it is decades away. In a book for an adult audience, the teenage years make sense when written as somewhat of a fever dream. More than that, though, a book about teenagers written for and by adults needs to tread carefully; don’t make them too mature, don’t make them too childlike. Smith toes that line, sometimes crossing too far to one side or the other, but overall, the book maintains its balancing act. Kody and Teal aren’t believable, but I think teenagers in general aren’t believable unless you actively are one ... The plot is just as warped as the characters it follows ... was not the book I expected it to be, and maybe that’s the best thing that could’ve happened. It wasn’t perfect, but its imperfections matched the messiness of its main characters and the slipperiness of the situation they’d gotten themselves into. And as a bonus, the ending at least partially resolved some of the complicated feelings I had about Kody’s often manipulative behavior towards Teal. While avoiding many of the pitfalls of an over-romanticized road trip novel, Smith still managed to capture some of the freedom and chaos of open skies that we all crave. Kody and Teal tear up their old lives and go on the lam from coast to coast so you don’t have to. This book allows you to gaze into the abyss of crushing possibility that opens up when you cut all ties with the world, and at the end of it all, leaves you feeling glad that you kept the distance of ink and pages between yourself and Kody and Teal’s adventure.
Ali Smith
PositiveThe Michigan DailyMeaning is meted out in small parcels that only make sense when you look at them backwards ... It is only with hindsight that you can understand the significance of many parts of the novel — and for those parts that still seem unconnected, you’ll want to start at the beginning again to see what you missed ... Sometimes the tangents went on too long, the dialogue was confusing and the timeline lost me. Sometimes the parts that mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic were a little too on-the-nose ... Overall, though, these pitfalls are overshadowed by an intriguing form, compelling language and interesting premise.
Emily St. John Mandel
RaveThe Michigan Daily... demanded that I read it all in one day. There are few things more exhilarating (to me, at least) than tearing through a book because it’s just that good. Nothing quite compares to getting to the end of a book and feeling compelled to read the \'Acknowledgements\' section and even the information about the typeface just so the book isn’t over, not quite yet. Luckily, this is not a book that ends when you read the last word on the last page, because it sticks with you and refuses to let you go ... Mandel dives straight into a complex web of timelines that reveal themselves over the course of the book, and does it in a way that feels utterly natural. Any time-hopping disorientation reads as purposeful ... While spanning centuries, Mandel manages to maintain a certain innate humanity that links her characters together despite their vast differences ... Another wildly impressive aspect of this novel is that it is a pandemic book — a book that explicitly references pandemics, COVID-19, lockdowns and the all-encompassing loneliness of the virtual world — all without sounding cringey, overwrought or too on-the-nose ... mind-bending without being confusing and somber without being sad. It is true to life, yet hopeful. For a book about time travel and moon colonies, it feels an awful lot like reality.
John Koenig
RaveMichigan DailyA beautiful little book that will leave a melancholy taste lingering on your tongue. It is a book that, by virtue of its definitions, defies its own definition. It will make you pay just a bit more attention to the world and people around you. It doesn’t shy away from deep emotions; it confronts them head-on, which makes for a tricky book. It can feel so big that it is overwhelming. Koenig manages to strike a good balance between heavy emotional deep-dives and compelling frivolity ... These are not just random words, though, pulled out of thin air and whipped into existence. They are taken from words that already exist and are refashioned, which grounds them in a linguistic reality while providing a framework through which Koenig can be creative ... Koenig uses words that already exist to describe other words that don’t yet exist, which is kind of the whole practice of writing: to capture something in words that don’t yet have a name. The best poetry lends language to a feeling or experience not yet captured. It’s why good poetry (and, by extension, this book) is so satisfying ... Koenig has a cunning ability to parse out emotions in a very specific way and pin them down into actual articulation, both in the word he creates itself and its poetic definition and etymology ...There is joy to be found in every nook and cranny of this book.
Jane Hirshfield
RaveThe Michigan DailyHirshfield’s ninth book of poetry is an elegy to her lost sister and the world she used to live in, the world that had her sister in it. The collection was strangely uplifting, however; Hirshfield deals with the challenging topic of death by creating poetry that finds wonder in mundanity ... Despite grappling with these complex ideas throughout the collection, Hirshfield makes room to play with form and sound ... She separates her own experience from the rest of the world, sending them briefly on two separate tracks. In this way, her poetry produces a curious dissociative effect which demonstrates the walls trauma can erect in a person ... Hirshfield writes with a respect for nature and a moving plea for environmentalism that is all the more effective after the many-pages-long emotional primer of her own personal loss ... Hirshfield’s subtle handling of environmental issues, rendered in masterful verse, forces the reader to think of climate change in terms of personal loss, rather than as an abstract and distant problem.
