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What would you feel like if your typical teenage life left behind when you found out that you were a faerie princess, and that you were the one hope to save your mother, the queen, and all the world of the faeries? That’s the premise behind C.B. Smith’s often delightful, sometimes erotically provocative novel, Diary Of A Teenage Faërie Princess. It’s funny and quirky, reminding me somewhat of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in its style.
The book is in many ways extremely entertaining and well worth reading, despite the Princess’s erotic encounters sometimes bordered on the (porno)graphic, and the inadequate editing. Grammatical errors and typos detracted from my appreciation of an otherwise interesting and humorous storyline.
The title character, Jaynie, is a typical fun-loving, practical joke-playing, skateboarding teenager. She believes that her toes are too big, though, which makes it difficult for her to find shoes that fit. She has to try to make a pair last her for as long as possible since it’s so hard to locate a store that carries the size she needs. She also likes to commit what the novel refers to as “her famous Public Acts of Atrocity,” such as
“touching herself inappropriately, picking her nose with chopsticks, fondling her colossal toes; in restaurants, bus stops, airports, newsstands, church services, any place that looked to her in need of disruption, which was just about anyplace. And
just as the actors from Le Grand Guignol, she judged her success by the number of faintings in her audience.”
She lives next door to a mysterious house where three monkeys reside, macaques which feature in several of the book’s chapters. They like to have fun and cause mischief; they gain the ability to talk when Jaynie opens a magical chest which she and a stranger called Leo Gabalot discover when they enter the house through a cellar door after the macaques steal her shoes.
She is attracted to Leo, and they have sex right there in the house, open the chest, and find a picture with a woman on it that looks very much like Jaynie. Jaynie hasn’t met Leo before, and she’s just sixteen (though close to seventeen). There’s little setup for the sex; it seems to happen too abruptly, and it may suggest to its audience that casual sex with strangers is acceptable. It happens right after they both check out the painting and notice the strong resemblance:
“It does look like me, Leo, that’s true. But right now I’m like very confused. I’m
a girl who rides skateboards and I have big toes. This does not like make me feel
attractive. But despite this abnormality, in moments of great confusion I find it best
to have sex. Let’s do it Leo. Right here, right now!”
When Jaynie eventually learns that the picture is of her mother and that she’s still alive (she sees an inscription on the painting that reads: “To my daughter, Princess Jaynie”) - she naturally wants to do whatever she can to get more information about her mother. She tries searching the Internet, typing in any keyword related to faeries she can think of. This results in her meeting a peculiar character called Mad Looney, a faerie she contacts through her efforts.
Looney tells her that her mother’s faerie name is Queen Anahit, and that Jaynie herself will soon be the new queen. When Jaynie asks him when that will happen, he answers her
“Bingo! The Million Dollar question. And the Million Dollar response: ONCE
WE FIND HER AND YOU TURN 1000.”
Her mother has been captured by an enemy of the faeries called BUGM. Faerie time is different than mortal time; 1000 faerie years equals seventeen human years. They need to find and rescue Jaynie’s mother, and do so before Jaynie turns 17. As Looney says,
“For 13 years our queen has been gone missing. This has imposed hardships aplenty
as well as allowing BUGM to seize control. If we don’t find her before yer birthday the transference of royal title cannot occur. And if that happens faerie will have no queen now and forever. At this sad news only BUGM will rejoice.”
Looney shrinks Jaynie down to a tiny size, and the two of them enter a door in a tree. That’s when the story really takes off. Jaynie experiences a culture shock, and there are funny bits in the novel where she tries to make herself understood. She learns that the boys her age are similar to human teenage boys in that they like to hook up and have casual sex - though they refer to it with different words.
Also, though all of Faeriedom (the novel refers to the land she is in as Sörmlandia) has anxiously anticipated her arrival, they treat her as if she has no place in participating in war-like activities and the rescue of her mother. She convinces them otherwise, experiences a transformation into a faerie, and eventually saves the day - as well as her mother - in the nick of time.
Diary Of A Teenage Faërie Princess is enchanting and humorous with plenty of action to make it appealing not only to teen girls but also teen boys. However, the sex scenes seem abrupt, and the descriptions of sexual attractions to either human or faerie males borders on the graphic.
Also, one example of a grammatical error or typo that escaped the attention of the editors is that the contraction “you’re” where “your” is called for. While this shouldn’t necessarily be blamed on the author, who otherwise has written a pretty good novel, both the grammatical problems the novel suffers from and the casual and abrupt sex scenes are the reasons for not assigning this novel a higher rating.
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Douglas R. Cobb/2009 for curled
up with a good kid's book |
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visit our sister site Curled Up With a Good Book (www.curledup.com)
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Diary Of A Teenage Faërie Princess