faerie wars

Faerie Wars was a fast read, clearly designed for the fantasy loving YA crowd, but who doesn't love a little bit of that! This story had it all--in addition to faeries--action, deceit, war, multiverse, magic, hi tech, murder, demons, shot guns, brimstone, and teen crushes. What else do you need? I think I read this in three days. no big deal, you say, but it normally takes me weeks to read a book

I must be on some kind of a jag--a bender even*--but seems like every book I've picked up since Updike has been written by a Brit. Herbie Brennan seems to know his way around a YA novel however, and this Faerie Wars series looks like it has 5 books thus far. Next on the list is The Purple Emperor.

Henry Atherton seems like a regular kid in his mid-teens. But the stresses of a less than perfect home life and middle class boredom quickly melt away as he comes across a misdirected faerie in the garden of a crotchety retiree he works for in his neighborhood. Pretty soon, the faerie is more than it seems, and so is the retiree, and Henry is up to his neck in the kind of excitement you don't normally run across in a small village in Britain. here ends my gushing, back-of-the-book review blurb

Brennan has constructed a story based on a pretty bulletproof structure, but the writing is light and easy to read, and the dialog is punctuated with some pretty sophisticated humor, including a fair amount of British sarcasm. It was also nice that this story wrapped up without a cliffhanger. Don't get me wrong, it looks like there is plenty of material for additional books, and enough storyline to carry on into other volumes, but the plot did cinch nicely at the end.


* this phrase is most properly articulated in a Snagglepuss accent