I loved this fantasy. One of my favorite books. There is so much going on in the story your attention will not drift from beginning to end. ( )

I absolutely loved this book! I love 'fairy tale' type novels and this one is great! Good from start to finish, no slow periods and just an overall great book. My mom, who is a sci-fi /mystery reader, picked up my book while she was waiting for me to come out of an appointment I had and she is now reading it (I let her read it after I had finished it).. so it even got my mom hooked.

First book I read by this author, but I liked it so much I'm going to see what else she's written :) ( )

A cute and creative story with moments of strong writing, but nothing that lingers with you after reading. ( )

Told from the point of view of 3 generations of women - personifying the mother, the maiden and the crone - Fair Peril is primarily the story of Buffy, a middleaged storyteller, and her quest for selfrealisation. Buffy, who has recently been replaced with a younger trophy wife, finds a talking frog. Rather than follow the fairy tale imperative and have it transform into a prince, she prefers to keep it as a gimmick at her storytelling arrangements.
Her teenage daughter Emily saves the frog and she and the prince ends up in Fair Peril - or faerie - where they keep being forced into fairy tales and archetypical roles.
Buffy sets out to save her daughter and manages to transform one man into a frog, another into a fog. She finds herself and Emily in the Mall, and manages to save both her and the prince with her storytelling powers, and a bout of introspection.
The passages told from the point of the crone - Buffys mother - seems tacked on with no relevance to the story. Other than that it is a sweet little story, with a fun take on fairy tales, the subconsious and archetypes.

It took me a while to get into the story, I suspect it may be because middleaged, maladjusted and fat women are hard to accept as heroes. ( )

Tiptree longlist 1996 ( )