Review: Fairy Tale by Cyn Balog

Fairy Tale by Cyn Balog


The Scoop:

Morgan Sparks and Cameron Browne are the perfect couple. They've known each other forever--they live next door to each other and they even have the same birthday. Morgan is a psychic and gives readings to her fellow classmates for french fries and random favors. Cameron is the perfect male specimen and the sophomore quarterback of their high school's football team. Everything is going perfectly for this perfect couple until a week before their joint sweet sixteen party. Enter the mysterious, if goofily clumsy, Pip Merriweather. Upon Pip's arrival Cam starts acting differently--distant to Morgan, his physical prowess diminishes, oh, and he starts growing wings. As in fairy wings. Apparently Cam is a changeling that was dumped in the mortal realm because he was a sickly fairy baby and not expected to live. He did live but his older brother, and heir to the throne, did not. Now the fairy king wants his only living son to come back to the Otherworld and has sent Pip back to make the exchange. So it's up to Morgan to determine her true destiny and keep her true love with her.




My Thoughts:

Well, after my voracious reading of the Iron Fey series I was all set to dive into another fairy book with high expectations. Unfortunately, this one fell a little flat. Morgan wasn't the most appealing of characters--she was vaguely annoying with her psychic abilities and proclaiming that she was always right (and even if that's true she didn't have to be all snooty about it). And she totally defined herself by her psychic abilities and having Cam as her boyfriend. She kept proclaiming that she would be nothing without him which annoyed me to no end. When Cam starts showing signs of changing physically from human to fairy and losing his ability to get a scholarship from playing football she encourags him to find his "new thing" but she couldn't seem to do the same for herself. She did show a little backbone in her quest to find a way to keep him with her in the mortal world but other than that she was kind of wishy-washy in general. And, as in some first person narratives, we, the reader, don't see much depth in her supposed soul-mate, Cam, nor in the "exchange" student, Pip.


That being said, I did read all the way through the story anticipating what would ulitmately happen to these three and how their lives would change and evolve. I don't know that Morgan changed very much in the end--she did become a lot more confident in her psychic readings but not much else changed in her--but there were vast changes in Cam and Pip (mostly relating to their true destinies and a lot of it was physical). I also enjoyed the quirks of the secondary characters--Morgan's parents as "the world's youngest senior citizens" always looking for early-bird specials and spending their evenings watching TV Land and eating popcorn and her best girlfriend, Eden, who has a massive crush on a boy that everybody else knows is gay. This book was a quick read and, for the most part, enjoyable.