The Good Fairies of New York

Title: The Good Fairies of New York
Author: Martin Millar
Published: Originally in 1992, this edition in 2008 by... umm, Tor?
Genre: Urban fantasy
Pages: 273 pages and over too soon




Whee, finally! There are only a few books by Mr. Millar that I haven't read, so I'm kinda saving them for a rainy day, but I've been looking forward to reading this! Oh, wait, I still have all the Thraxas-books to read!

(Three sentences, all ending with exclamation marks. You know, the first time I rented The Big Lebowski, the Finnish VHS tape cover had only a three-sentence description in the back, and all three ended with exclamation marks. The description was utter crap, but the movie rocks.)

A bunch of fairies from the British isles accidentally end up in New York, including Scottish Heather and Morag, who just love to hate each other and are constantly fighting. This costs them several family heirlooms, and not just from their own families. Which just creates a whole lot of other trouble. They soon find themselves pursued by local Chinese, black and Italian fairies. Solace can luckily be found at Kerry's, who's desperately trying to finish her Celtic flower alphabet to win an arts competition, and at Dinnie's, where there really isn't so much solace as there's drunken swearing and bad fiddling. Plus there's a struggling performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a bag lady on a roaring rampage of WAR!, a dead musician after his guitar, and a lot of drinking. Oh, and the Cornish king of fairies really wants two of the New York escapees back. Opressing all his subjects just isn't enough.


Like with other of his books, Millar has about a dozen characters running -or flying, especially after that damned poppy- around the place, but everything comes together to tell a lovely story which makes me all happy inside.




"Two fairies just came through my window and were sick on the carpet!" he screamed on reaching Fourth Street, not fully realizing the effect that this would have on the passers-by till the men sweating with sacks round a garbage truck stopped to laugh at him.
"What'd you say?"
"Upstairs," gasped Dinnie. "Two fairies, with kilts and violins and little swords... green kilts..."
The men stared at him. Dinnie's monologue ground to a halt.