“Once Upon a Time” Could Be Right Now

Sarah J. Sover, Fairy Godmurder (Fractured Fae Book 1)

Gwendoline Evenshine worked hard to become a fairy godmother, and blew it; her very first charge was murdered on hallowed ground, in broad daylight. So she hardened her heart and rededicated her life to bringing down the killer, a serial monster nicknamed The Brain Scraper. This mysterious beast stalks the soot-streaked streets of fairyland, murdering magical beings for mysterious purposes. But the case has taken a dark turn, and Gwen suddenly finds herself the target.

Sarah Sover’s second novel isn’t groundbreaking, but don’t consider that a knock against it. Sover follows a beat-sheet beloved by popular cross-genre novelists like Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, a hybrid of traditional paperback fantasy and midcentury noir mystery. The product is a darkly playful overlap that, to Sover’s benefit, comes with a built-in audience. Veteran readers will recognize when the next plot twist or brutal betrayal is coming, without truly spoiling the surprise.

The story proceeds along two tracks. In the present, Gwen haunts the midnight streets of Korranthia, a fairy kingdom roughly corresponding with New England. Haunted by her greatest failure, Gwen paused her personal and professional life, dedicating everything to chasing that one phantom. She works as a police consultant, but only on the Brain Scraper case, using her fairy godmother skills to examine bodies for evidence that ordinary forensics can’t find. It hasn’t helped much.

In flashbacks, we get Gwen’s backstory. Fresh from the Academy, Gwen is assigned fairy godmother status over Princess Francesca (that’s “Frankie” to you), heir of Korranthia’s royal house. Frankie expects to inherit authority over the precarious balance between her fairy kingdom and the increasingly volatile United States. But she lives with a dark foreboding that she’ll never actually live to receive her inheritance. Despite her power and skill, Gwen is powerless to prevent Frankie’s doom.

This dualism gives readers a jarring view of Gwen at different life stages. The present Gwen is hard-bitten, desperate to avoid building relationships or having feelings. Because she dared to care about Princess Frankie, and her big-sisterly guidance ended horrifically. We know from Chapter One that Frankie is doomed, and watch helplessly as, like Amanda Palmer, her story plays to its inevitable conclusion. Gwen is desperate never to fail, or be that heartbroken ever again.

Sarah J. Sover

However, boring old reality persistently intrudes. Gwen can only pursue the case by remaining in the Korranthia PD’s good graces, and the fuzz cares more about maintaining order than pursuing justice. And Gwen never formally completed her magical training, meaning she still needs her old Academy connections to decipher the scanty evidence she’s collected. Thus, despite her desire for independence, she keeps falling back on the two institutions dominating young people’s lives: law and school.

Not that Gwen’s truly alone. Two allies, a griffin homicide detective and a pixie true-crime blogger, continue supporting Gwen, despite her cynical façade. And her old Academy mentor makes frequent overtures to tempt Gwen back, promising the largess of power and old-girl-network connections. Gwen, like Harry Dresden, is extremely powerful, but needs guidance to channel that power. But Gwen finds the temptations of friendship, insidership, and power threatening. Especially in fairyland, there’s farther to fall.

Sover mixes contemporary and folkloric influences in different measures at different times. The flashbacks presaging Princess Frankie’s murder, and Gwen’s fall from grace, read like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, salted with allusions to contemporary politics and culture war issues. Sover’s “present” chapters read more like a conventional hard-boiled procedural. This duality hits harder because this is the first novel I’ve read which effectively uses the COVID-19 pandemic in its setting. Sover’s fairyland feels very real.

As an aside, Korranthia’s mythic beings come from European myth: fairies, gnomes, ogres. The characters swear by Danu, an Irish goddess. Nowhere do Native American mythic beings appear, despite the New England setting. It’s entirely the mythology of the colonizers, not the colonized. This feels like a real missed opportunity, especially in light of Sover’s use of contemporary politics in her mythological milieu. I hope she corrects this understandable but large oversight in future books.

This novel feels like the slipstream genre I read extensively ten years ago, but haven’t seen much recently. Sover uses the imagery of myth and folklore, but brings the stakes into a contemporary scope. She addresses issues that seem timely to modern readers, especially women, but narrates those issues in ways that seem sometimes almost whimsical. She doesn’t lecture or scold her readers, but like in the best literature, ultimately, the story is about us.