It's a story of growing up and the demons that you acquire through the difficult times of learning to be an adult and losing your childhood innocence. The book was captivating, the characters made sense, and the love triangle between the three best friends and Alice was very much the same sort of games we played in high school. It's a well written book of the sort that could easily fit in the fiction aisle, or fantasy. ( )

http://www.monniblog.com/2003/08/the-... ( )

The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce is a 1996 novel which in 1997 won the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth award for Best Novel.

The library copy that I originally read is labelled (by the library) as YA Fantasy, and I can see how they got to that categorisation. It fits some of the usual YA tropes – a young protagonist and his friends grow from children to teenagers to proto-adults as the book and story unfolds; we see them dealing with the perceived vicissitudes of their young lives; we see them making sure their parents never find out what they have really been up to with their friends; we see them rebelling against real and perceived authority in various ways, and so on. We see them effectively going through some rite of passage and by books end have them moving on to the next phase of maturity as a person in their society. In this case, it’s the English Midlands in the 1960s: a time of Beatles songs, Morris Mini cars, pirate radio stations and so forth. So I can understand the YA tag.

And the fantastical elements of the story involving the title character give the library the perfect reason for labelling it as Fantasy.

But you know, pull out the fantastical elements and change the setting from 1960s Coventry to late 1960s /early 1970s Hobart, Tasmania, and Joyce could be telling the story of my own childhood.

What he has managed to do in this book is distill and describe the experience of growing up through the teenage years so very well that I dare say any male of a certain age and above will be able to recognise himself somewhere in the experiences described in this story.

And that to me is why this book is the triumph that it is – it speaks a set of universal truths that those of us who have survived and grown through our teenage years know and now instinctively understand. Things will change, the world moves on, and you can’t stay where you are forever because the world won’t let you.

That’s why this book deserves the award it was given.

So, is it a YA fantasy? Yes it is, but it is also so much more. ( )

http://scooterchronicles.com/2007/11/... ( )

I read this book when I was in high school and enjoyed it, but now I'm getting everything. A poignant and eerie bildungsroman that could have tread tired old ground but instead remains fresh and interesting. ( )