The Tooth Fairy

While out playing with his two friends Sam inadvertently loses a tooth. Determining to find out if the tooth fairy really does exist he places it under his pillow before falling asleep and has managed to keep the loss from his parents. Unfortunately for Sam (and the fairy) he awakens to find the tooth fairy skulking about his room and after a brief verbal exchange the fairy takes the tooth and leaves a sixpence in return (this is middle England of the 1960's) and admonishes Sam not to tell anyone of his existence or bad things will happen. What follows is a coming-of-age story with the continual appearance of the mercurial tooth fairy especially at momentous times during Sam's maturing from young boy through adolescence and into young show more adulthood. A lot of these experiences are not pleasant for anyone involved as the author takes us to the darker edge of what it's like growing up.

I really enjoy Joyce's writing and he's not afraid of making his readers uncomfortable with the situations and thought processes of his characters. He sets the tone perfectly with the fairy tale allusions being firmly grounded in reality. The friendship and travails of the three boys is very well handled and evoked some memories of my own childhood. They go through some tough times but always manage to remain together throughout. I enjoyed the book immensely but not everyone will and I will leave this review with a warning that sexual content and profanity feature heavily in this novel so if that's not for you then you should probably avoid. show less

The Tooth Fairy is a dark meditation on the pains of growing up, following a trio of boys in rural England during the 60s. Sam, the main character is haunted by the titular Tooth Fairy, a shape shifting fairy who exacts a terrible price on Sam’s loved ones. This is a really good psychological drama about just how alone children are, about the uncanny bonds of friendship, and about the roiling tensions of puberty. The periodness of the setting is very present without being overwhelming: drugs, delinquency, white collar despair, pop music. Oddly enough, my least favorite parts were the overtly supernatural. The malevolent, protean, codependent Tooth Fairy just didn’t cohere as an external force of menace, or really more than a super show more extended metaphor for various growing pains. A stylish and fun book, but not my cup of tea. show less

I wish I could give 4.95 stars. The blurbs on the back of the book state : "Brilliant and unclassifiable", "Sharp, freshly imagined" "Complex and funny". All do a very poor job telling us about this book. They make is sound mundane. There is nothing mundane about this. I love the way Graham Joyce blurs the lines between "reality" and "fantasy". I find myself asking what do I think is real...what IS fantasy? There were points in this book that were laugh out loud moments, it could not be helped. There were moments of quiet horror..."Did I just read what I read?". But most of all for me, this is a story about friendship. True friendship with all its trials and tribulations. Gorgeous.

Graham Joyce surely is one of the most underrated authors...is this possibly because he is so hard to market? Is he horror? Is he fantasy? Or possibly `social surrealism'...?

What ever he is his stories are strange, magical and original and he fast becoming one of my favourite authors.

He likes to instill in the reader a feeling of lingering uneasiness …. ‘You come away from the book feeling your perception of the world has been just been knock slightly askew away from what you previously thought to be normal’ Graham refuses to come down on one side or the other of the ideas he presents in his novel, it is all about ambiguity and uncertainty

Sam, Clive and Terry are ordinary (ish) boys growing up in the 1960s until one day when show more Clive punches Sam in the mouth and knocks out a tooth. …Sam puts the tooth under his pillow at bedtime…as you do

He wakes up during the night and first lays eyes on the Tooth Fairy “oddly dressed and smelling of horse’s sweat and chamomile”.

Tinkerbelle this Fairy is not …it is an angry, bitter and viscous looking creature from nightmare.

Thus begins a strange, disturbing sometimes touching relationship with the Tooth Fairy as it dogs Sam’s footsteps through childhood and into adolescence.

The Tooth Fairy, whose appearance, mood and sex change constantly makes for a rather unpredictable, mercurial companion - sometimes protecting Sam other times tormenting him, bullying and threatening him and his family. The Fairy is a character in its own right with its own moods and emotions, jealously, lust, spite, anger and touching moments of tenderness. The author skilfully coveys the wild, unpredictable primeval nature of the Tooth Fairy.

Without the supernatural element, the adolescent adventures of Sam and his friends would have made a brilliantly funny ‘rites of passage’ novel…all petty vandalism (though making pipe bombs in your Dad’s shed is hardly petty), growing pains and awakening sexuality.

The novel is brilliantly structured, well characterised and entirely compelling and the elegant writing at times is almost prose with a whimsical and nostalgic tone.

This novel shows that horror fiction doesn’t not have to be high octane ‘gore splatter’ serial killing zombies but that it can be beautiful, compulsive, hilarious, tragic, magical and very, very funny …oh very, very rude! show less

This is a very unusual coming-of-age tale that's as much a horror story as it is a warped English version of The Outsiders. The story starts off the with the proposition: What would happen if you lost a tooth and then deposited beneath your pillow without telling your parents? Would the tooth fairy still arrive during the dark of night and snatch your tooth, leaving coinage in its place? The tooth fairy in this tale becomes more a symbol for the young boy's dark side than a carefree sprite. I thought that this book was an amazing journey through a troubled adolescence. Highly recommended, but not for the squeamish.

A Jungian coming of age story that straddles both the genre of horror and (dark) fairytale. Well-written and complex, it follows a boy's journey from childhood into that of a young adult. The brilliant part of this book, is that reader is never quite sure if the main character (Sam) is imagining the tooth fairy (which would make she/he a metaphor for the loss of Sam's childhood), or if the tooth fairy is indeed real. I would have given the book 5-stars, the writing was very good, but there were parts of the story I found a bit too graphic for my tastes. Definitely worth a read, however.

While a very enjoyable novel, I'm not sure exactly how to describe it. It's a coming of age story about a boy who also discovers the tooth fairy. Unfortunately the tooth fairy is not quite the friendly magical creature that we think. In fact, the relationship that develops between Sam, the main character and the tooth fairy is often antagonistic and brutal, but also loving and seductive. Obviously this has many profound effects on Sam and in turn on his friends. And we stay with them all from a young age of five or six to their late teens, experiencing along with them things like a first kiss, lost toes, a genius and death. Joyce's character development throughout the book is wonderful and very involving. I know that I'm not getting it show more across here but I found myself not wanting it to end. If you want an off beat tale about kids growing up, then this is definitely a book for you. show less