"Some Kind of Fairy Tale" by Graham Joyce

Synopsis (from dust jacket): It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phone call from his parents.  It pulls him into a bewildering mystery.

His sister, Tara, had come back home.  Not so unusual you might think, this is a time when families get together.  But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back, and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family has, unspoken, feared that she was dead.  But now she's back, tired, disheveled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent traveling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim.

But her stories don't quite hang together and the intervening years have been very kind to Tara . . . She really does look no different from the young women who walked out the door twenty years ago.  Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter is not so sure.  There is something about her.  A haunted, otherworldly quality.  Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies.

And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family...

My review:  I enjoyed this book.  It wasn't quite what I was expecting but that's because the synopsis doesn't give much of the story away and there's not a lot you can say about it without using spoilers.  The story opens with Tara returning home after being gone for twenty years.  Twenty years ago, Tara disappeared without a trace and the story deals in part with what happened in the aftermath.  How people did or didn't deal with it.  How people's lives were affected.  Upon her return, the story deals with where she was during those twenty years.  The book is supposedly narrated by one character but tells the stories of different characters' points of view.  I found it difficult to decide whom to believe, and that may have been the point of using more than one POV.  After a while, I became attached to certain characters, wanting to know what would happen to them.  In particular, I wanted to know more about Richie, the boyfriend.  To me, he seemed the most affected by Tara's disappearance.  I was disappointed with the ending but it's open-ended enough that you are left with questions but also the ability to decide for yourself where the rest of the story would go.  I'm disappointed that there wasn't more about the relationship between Tara and Hiero.

My only negative comment about the book is that even in the synopsis there is a spelling/grammatical error.  It should read 'look no different from the young wom[a]n who walked out the door'.  There were missing punctuation marks and spelling errors ('a way' instead of 'away') in the book.  And one section had both sides of a conversation in one run-sentence with no punctuation or breaks to differentiate between the characters that were speaking...and yet I could still figure out what character was saying what.

I first heard about this book on The Readers Podcast.  I waited until after I read the book to listen to the podcast episode and enjoyed hearing from the author.

Read on,

Paula