Good Fairies of New York is a quirky, humorous novel that at the same time captures the sad social situation of New York City in the 70-80s period before the renaissance and the transformation of the 90s. That description is more serious than it sounds because what happens with the human’s New York is just the background, the real actions of the book are the various fairies of different ethic groups living (or visiting) the city!

First of all Martin Millar’s writing style is not for everyone. It’s like following someone with ADD! Two paragraphs in he’s already switch his focus to another character, and then another character, and then another one. He can switch like 10 times in a chapter, and each chapter is like 2-4 pages!!! This type of narrative might work on a television show like Lost or Heroes, but for a literature work, it’s very difficult to follow, especially at the beginning when all the characters are unfamiliar to the readers. It gets better after a while when you finally remember the names of the many different characters, but the beginning part I was just so annoyed by this style. However, the end is satisfying because all these complex plot lines and characters all comes together perfectly, it’s very amazing!

So the story begins with two Scottish fairies landed themselves in New York after stirring up troubles back home. They meet a fat and mean human named Dinnie and a pretty but poor and sick girl named Kerry. For each of their own agenda the fairies want to fix these two up. It seems like a simple plot but somehow it involved an art competition, a crazy bag lady on the street that thinks she’s an ancient Greek general, the industrialization of the English fairies, the evil King of English fairies and the rebels, the warring clans of different Scottish fairies and their attempt to capture the two exiled fairies, the Irish fairies, the Black fairies in Harlem, the Italian fairies of Little Italy, the Chinese fairies in Chinatown, the ghost of Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, a flower alphabet, and the war of fairies in central park! Seriously the characters in this book is mind blowingly complicated and yet you can’t keep it off your hands once you get into it!!

P.S. the author watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer in his spare time – no wonder he is so imaginative! he’s a fellow member of the Buffyverse!

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Tagged: Books · fairies · New York