Review – A Fairy Tale for Skeptical Adults
In the quest to write the ultimate ‘fish out of water’ story, I wrote A Fairy Tale for Skeptical Adults.
I wrote this story during second quarter 2024. This was a quarter when I was writing every single day.
Background
I love the idea of someone just kind of being tossed into an odd situation not of their own making. Because that is precisely what happens to both Flora and Thomas.
Plot of A Fairy Tale for Skeptical Adults
When Flora Levy receives her inheritance, it’s just a stack of books. But one of them is Fairy Tales for the Skeptical Adult.
And when she starts to read the book out loud, a sudden crash alerts her to the fact that this has somehow summoned a character from the book.
Can a modern woman and a character from a book fix problems in two very separate worlds?
Characters
The human characters include Flora Levy, Florence Levy (her great-grandmother), Prince Thomas, King Richard, Queen Catherine, and Constance Selene. Animal characters include Auburn, Robert, Brownie, Quicksilver, and Swift.
Much like a lot of other fantasy tales, the animals talk. And to make them a bit like I suppose the Disney version of Cinderella, the animals even help out. Therefore, you see Auburn (a red fox) arranging Flora’s hair for a banquet. Robert the mouse is a scribe and does calligraphy.
In fact, the animals are considerably more trustworthy than a lot of the humans turn out to be. #spoileralert
Memorable Quotes
Flora cautiously crept toward the source of the crash. It was the next room—the Victorian house had a lot of small rooms—a place where she grew plants, both flowers and some vegetables.
She turned the corner in the small hallway and came face to face with the source of the crash. It was a man of perhaps forty, wearing breeches, stockings, brogans, and a brocaded cloak over a cambric shirt.
The two of them stared at each other for a few moments, open-mouthed. The intruder was… different.
You make no sense. Finally, she found her voice and, absurdly, brandished the thermos. “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house?”
“I, I,” he began, in an upper class British accent, “I’m the man of your dreams.”
Say what? “Buddy, you have no idea what is in my dreams.”
“I, I still am. It is I, your, your dream.”
“I’m not interested in some reject from a Renfest. And how the hell did you get into my house in the first place?”
Rating
The story has a K rating.
Takeaways for A Fairy Tale for Skeptical Adults
I am not so thrilled with how I ended this one. It just kind of runs out of gas. But apart from that, I believe it works pretty well. Flora starts out a little like Sandra Bullock at the start of The Net. That is, she’s essentially alone.
I do like that this is one of the things that changes about her. But it’s not necessarily what a reader would expect.