Review: Heartfelt and beautifully written - not the farce the title suggests.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 15, 2013
The title of Alex Beecroft's book, "Too Many Fairy Princes," doesn't really quite do it justice.It is too elegant, too delicately wrought, its emotions too genuinely felt, to be classed as a farce, which is what I think the title suggests. Maybe the author, who is a really wonderful writer, thought it would help sell it.To be truthful, there is farce here, but it is more like a surreal comedy of manners, because the worlds of Kjartan and Joel are so different, their worldviews so completely alien to each other (at first), that it cannot help but make you laugh. But what struck me in reading this book was the wonderful sense of observation - the careful way the author makes us feel we are seeing something actually happen - the strangeness of Joe's discovery of a clearly magical creature right out of Tolkien collapsed behind his trash bins.  The strangeness that Kjarten feels while experiencing reactions to this bumbling, awkward human that shouldn't even exist according to his training and his station.Beecroft offers some of the most beautifully crafted narrative in the m/m genre, bringing in the paranormal/magical aspects of the tale as if she was an anthropologist studying an isolated tribe (which, of course, she is).  And she doesn't make everything neat and tidy - we get the world of elves as it is, a mixture opulence and hatefulness. She lets us see Joel through Kjartan's eyes, and vice versa, and lets us feel what they feel with a gentle touch that traps us in the ultimate, crystalline truth of this fairy tale - that love is transformative, powerful, destructive, and potentially redemptive.And, beyond all belief, HM Queen Elizabeth II appears, and it totally makes sense.  Read it, you'll see.