Review: FAIRY TALES CAN COME TRUE, THEY CAN HAPPEN TO YOU
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 14, 2014
In case there are any questions, this is a fairy tale. There aren't any fairy godmothers, coaches turning into pumpklns, or evil witches and it's set in our modern world. But it's as realistic as anything you'd find in Grimm's Fairy Tales.Which is not a knock on the book. I liked it. That's why I gave it five stars, As an aside, I give most of my reviews high ratings, for the simple reason that I tend not to finish books that I don't really like. There's nothing wrong with fairy tales that appeal to deep seated longings on the part of many female (I assume married) readers of romances.Jill Owens is a princess in a gilded tower (mansion) guarded by a fearsome ogre (her attorney husband) who drapes her in furs but berates and humiliates and degrades her when he takes time to notice she's alive. A woman of talents, she fell in love with the ogre when she thought he was a handsome prince and over the years and two children, her dreams have been ruthlessly crushed.When her best friend breaks her leg on the eve of flying to Ireland for the wedding of a cousin, the friend asks Jill to use her ticket which is non-refundable to fly to Ireland for the wedding. Knowing that nobody in her family, except the son who is her ally, would even think of letting her go, she plots her escape and simply goes without letting her husband Scott know. But she does leave him a note telling him she'll be back in a week.In a very real way, this is a story without surprise. It telegraphs its punches, but again, we generally know what to expect in fairy tales. The Princess makes it to a new land and from the very beginning attracts the gaze of handsome Princes from foreign lands who vie to rescue her from the Ogre. One is a newspaper reporter from the U.S., the other is a handsome Irishman.She falls for the handsome Irishman, for his family, for his country and learns that he is not only good and noble, but wealthy and famous in his own right. Now, the Irishman has no choice but to fall for Jill because as in any fairy tale, she is beautiful, appears younger than her age, has a smoking body, is kind and loving, is great in bed (alright, that probably wouldn't appear in many fairytales - let's just say they are VERY compatible), and to top it all off, has a gift of song.A gift so strong that it allows her to meet and then join a rising band (think U2 in the early days) and achieve all her dreams of singing before multitudes of cheering, adoring fans. So she finds love, happiness, fulfillment of her dreams and THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER.How could you not call that a fairytale?Actually, the story is written as realistically as you could write a fairytale and the plot turns do make sense. There are also more than a few bumps in the road, metaphorical  monsters that would snatch happiness away from the Princess and her new Prince. But the best fairytales have monsters as well as handsome Princes.So, it's a good story, but I feel I should address one criticism I've seen, which is that basically Jill is a selfish slut who leaves her hard working husband and children for a good time in Ireland and turns her back on a troubled marriage instead of going back and trying to work things out with the Ogre, who after all, had once upon a time been a Prince himself.Of course, I don't expect that to have much traction with female readers. They cheer for Jill to dump the Ogre, but if the Ogre  had still been a Prince and Jill had still loved him and he'd walked in one day and said the magic had gone away and he had met a new Princess, female readers would not be chanting: Dump her, Dump her, Dump her. No, he would have been the archetypical BAD Husband doomed to roast in the fires of Hell.I know all the arguments female readers will make. The author stacked the deck against any hope of saving the marriage by turning the Prince into a cruel Ogre AFTER the children are gone so there is just the dying husk of a marriage left. But as in many fairy tales, there's an element of truth and a tough moral question.We live in an era where we are basically encouraged to kill off any marriage where our deepest needs are not being met. Marriages are literally not worth the paper they're written on. Which means that there are only a handful of marriages that can hope to go the distance. Which has brought us into our present world of multiple, sequential marriages, tons of step parents, family trees that only a mathematician can analyze. But we're happy, right?Contrast that to the bad old days when couples married almost literally for life. You might have to take mistresses or lovers on the side to keep from going crazy, but there was stability and order. Were they happier? Who knows. Present day critics would say of course they weren't. Our way is better. But present day critics are biased toward our world of shifting marriage alliances and floating marriages. Our great great grandchildren might not feel the same way.So the question this fairy tale asks is what responsibility do partners in an unhappy marriage have to try to make things better? Any? None?  Jill would answer one way, how would you?And while you're thinking about  that, buy the book. It's a good read.