Fairy tale

by Stephen King

A brave man helps. A coward just gives presents.

    First and foremost, happy 2023! I hope this first week has treated you well and that any resolutions you may have set are off to strong starts. There have been a few major changes in my life that I am reflecting on as I write this,  but one thing I want to say is that it has officially been a year since I started this blog page and reviewing books and creating this site. It's been a fun challenge and I know I will continue this page for the foreseeable future and beyond.

That said, let's get to this review!

I had seen this book first on Instagram, a few months before I bought it. I was worried it was going to be a horror story, and those are not what I am about. I didn't do my research like I said I would, but one day, in Kroger, it was there, and 25% off. 

Now, I've completed this story and I am so happy I started off the year in this book. So many good things happened, from plot, to writing styles, and small little tokens that really brought magic into this story. I've seen reviews say this is a "raunchy Happy Potter", and I disagree. While I can see what they mean, theres not enough of either elements from those stories in Fairy tale, and I think they were just using those titles as clickbait. 

Its like the first book in the Harry Potter series, where it starts off as a realistic fiction story, nothing seem out of the ordinary until it was, and yes there are some raunchy jokes, but not enough to bring up in a review, after all, the main character is a 17 year-old boy, what can you expect?

Charlie Reade gives us his account of an adventure he took when he was a young man. An adventure to another world. The key was kindness to an old man whole fell off a ladder while cleaning the gutters.

Charlie makes it his mission to care for this old man, Mr. Bowditch, until he's back on his feet, as a way of fulfilling a promise he keeps close to his heart. A promise to God.

Mr. Bowditch turns out to not be such a crochetey old man but a very interesting one. As Charlie learns more and more about him, he soon learns that the shed in the backyard holds nothing but a ditch. A ditch that turns into a staircase that leads to another world. The world where our fairytales hail from.

What he finds there is right out of the Grimm's stories, but as he spends more time there, he feels himself turning into one of those famous characters children will read about for centuries. 

King added a lot of interesting layers to this story, there are a lot of parallel characters between Charles home world and the one he entered, which gives the idea that those worlds are parallel universes, and some have had the fortune to travel between them. That Charlie might be a high school student in one world, but a prince in another.  Georgiana Womack, with the strawberry birthmark on her check could have been a mute princess that had to eat through a red sore in her check because her mouth was gone. It gave it the idea that maybe a that a neighbor or distant cousin has been a one of those famous adventures and returned. As if that magic portal could be anywhere, just covered by a cement slab or has a house built right on top of it. 

One small joke, or I took it as a joke, was a page where Charlie is expecting this dog to talk back and answer a question, but then says "Well, duh. It wasn't that kind of fairy tale," I found this funny because fairy tales usually have a talking animal, so I thought that was a fun poke at genre expectations. 

The tone starts off in Kings 'good-ole-sourthen-boy" kinda way, and transforms into a more magical tone, where characters spoke all different languages, but magic made them all understand each other, using old words and old nursery rhymes. It went from old-southern-boy, to whatever the Grimm's British tone is. 

The pace was great, it was slow where it needed to be, but since its being told from the main character as a flashback, King could use small pacers like "But then it was", or "Little did I know," things like that to keep the reader interested and excited to see what was coming, or what 'it was" or what Charlie "didn't know" at that time. It is a great tool to keep the plot moving forwards while keeping the reader guessing. 

It was a great tale and a fun read, as any good fairy tale should be. The King does fairytales very well indeed. I highly recommend this book to anyone, it was a great adventure

:)