Review: Fairy Tale by Cyn Balog

Pip knows everything about fairies. Fairy thoughts. Fairy dreams. Fairy motivations. 

Fairy weaknesses.

And he doesn't know it yet, but he's going to tell me them all. He's going to help me find a way to save Cam.

Fairy Tale, by Cyn Balog, is a book about a girl named Morgan and her best friend (who is also her super hot boyfriend) Cameron. Morgan is a self-proclaimed psychic--her visions always come true. Cameron is the all around great guy, captain of the football team, and general hunk. They've been eating paste together since they were five, and now they're both fast approaching their sixteenth birthday. Morgan has been planning a joint sweet sixteen, and it's going to be perfect. That is, until a strange boy named Pip shows up with a feisty fairy named Dawn--whom Cameron happens to be engaged to. Say what? Dawn has come to take Cameron back to the fairy world--Otherworld--to become King. Morgan won't let that happen. She'll fight to keep Cam with her at any cost, believing that's the way it's meant to be. But could Morgan possibly be wrong?

I started reading Fairy Tale three weeks ago, but accidentally left it in a friend's car. Not only was that bad because it was a library book, but it was bad because I wanted to keep reading it. I randomly thought about it throughout the day, thinking about the situation and the characters. Just randomly, I started thinking of this book. It was to the point where I NEEDED to get it back. So when I finally did, I finished it easily throughout the day. I loved it!

It's not too bad of a length (248 pages) and it's relaxing to read. Not really a beach book, but more of a 'lounge-in-bed-for-hours-and-forget-to-feed-the-cat' kind of book. Morgan, the narrator, is enjoyable. She's so completely a teenage girl--she worries, she cries, she laughs, and I found it easy to connect. One of my favorite things about the book was Morgan's tendency to use comparison to describe things. For instance, as she's trying to sneak into her math class (where the teacher doesn't like her):

"The entire class was staring at me. [Mr.] Tanner's look could melt faces a la the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is just perfect. I bet I could be Master of Pi from here on out and he'd still want to murder me."

She's a thoroughly entertaining narrator, and as she gets more stressed and emotional near the end of the book, I felt it too. I also like how the story was told in present tense. It gave more of a sense of, "I don't know where this is going to end, or how she's going to fix things." Because anything could happen.

This is the first book in a while that I've read that hasn't been part of a series, so the pacing was hard to get used to. One thing that Cyn Balog did that I really liked was end every chapter with a foreboding one-liner. I really liked it. Character-wise, I absolutely loved Morgan. I adored Cam. For some reason, Pip was hard to get used to. I think maybe because Morgan was resisting him so much, I was too. And I don't like his name haha. (This isn't the first time an awesome character has gotten a not-so-awesome name. In Kristin Cashore's novel Graceling, Po was AMAZING... I just couldn't stand his name). Pip WAS great, though. Watching the relationships between the characters change was certainly an interesting process.

All in all, I give this book 4/5 men swimming in bacon. I definitely recommend it!

With love, From Chelsea (: