This series focuses on stories that are both enjoyable and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective. This week, let’s see who’s coming to dinner.
Like many of you, I’ve done a lot of reading about the Fair Folk. As a result, I had a lot of preconceptions on the topic when I started reading “Faerie Food“, by Kat Otis (published in Daily Science Fiction). The author was ready for this, though, and made these preconceptions part of the core conflict of the story.
What’s particularly clever here is Otis’s use of her readers’ preconceptions to help them identify with the point of view character. She shares the same views of Fairyland as any of us would get from reading classical stories, standing in for the readers as she goes on her journey there (to meet her boyfriend’s parents…apparently that part of Fairyland is in her school district). By the end, a few plot twists have used this identification with the POV character to throw down a gauntlet for us all, challenging us to question our preconceptions and ourselves.
Of course, none of that would matter if it weren’t a great story. I enjoyed reading it tremendously, and it was just as much fun to reread it while I was writing this piece. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.