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A review by sgbrux
Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist
3.0
3.25 stars rounded to 3.
I’ve somehow ended up reading back to back novels involving changeling lore, which I haven’t really seen a whole lot of, though the ones depicted in Faerie Tale are only a small part of the overarching story rather than being the main plot (won’t mention the title of the other because spoiler).
Faerie Tale was written around the mid-80s and it definitely feels that way. It has some Stephen King-esque horror elements, which were creepy, and I thought the characterization was good.
There are some content triggers to call out—mainly a supernatural rape scene that occurred and some really disturbing sexual-related scenes involving a young child. The latter was explained later, but it still bothered me. There’s also some hypersexualization of women characters that seems common for the 80s from what I’ve read (big, perky breasts, big doe eyes—that sort of thing), but a lot of the sexual content involves the fae creatures and other Irish and Gaelic lore.
I gave this book a try after reading To Ride Hell’s Chasm by Janny Wurts, which I loved. I have the Feist/Wurts Empire trilogy to read soon, so I wanted to get a sense of individual writing before tackling their joint effort for comparison. I’m really excited to get to those books!
I often felt this book could’ve been a good 100–125 pages shorter and still been eerie and suspenseful, maybe even “heart-racing,” but it just felt slower to me.
I’ll make available some of my highlights for you to take a look!
I’ve somehow ended up reading back to back novels involving changeling lore, which I haven’t really seen a whole lot of, though the ones depicted in Faerie Tale are only a small part of the overarching story rather than being the main plot (won’t mention the title of the other because spoiler).
Faerie Tale was written around the mid-80s and it definitely feels that way. It has some Stephen King-esque horror elements, which were creepy, and I thought the characterization was good.
There are some content triggers to call out—mainly a supernatural rape scene that occurred and some really disturbing sexual-related scenes involving a young child. The latter was explained later, but it still bothered me. There’s also some hypersexualization of women characters that seems common for the 80s from what I’ve read (big, perky breasts, big doe eyes—that sort of thing), but a lot of the sexual content involves the fae creatures and other Irish and Gaelic lore.
I gave this book a try after reading To Ride Hell’s Chasm by Janny Wurts, which I loved. I have the Feist/Wurts Empire trilogy to read soon, so I wanted to get a sense of individual writing before tackling their joint effort for comparison. I’m really excited to get to those books!
I often felt this book could’ve been a good 100–125 pages shorter and still been eerie and suspenseful, maybe even “heart-racing,” but it just felt slower to me.
I’ll make available some of my highlights for you to take a look!