WADO's review

The Good Fairies of New York
by Martin Millar

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16789.The_Good_Fairies_of_New_York?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Good Fairies of New York" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166759020m/16789.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16789.The_Good_Fairies_of_New_York?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Good Fairies of New York</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9320.Martin_Millar">Martin Millar</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8305456?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars That anyone bothers surfing the internet on their own time is absurd. When you are not at work you could be eating, drinking, writing, playing baseball, taking karate, licking someone’s neck, looking at stars, getting into fights or cutting down cell phone towers. What the hell good is sitting down to a high-jacked internet connection if all you are going to do is read Pitchfork the entire night? Get serious about your time, and use those well-paid, or well, paid company hours at your job like the living economic cancer you are and look for great new writers, music, movies, and games. Start researching New Media Economic theory when you are supposed to be collating those reports and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Then go out there and find books like Martin Millar’s The Good Fairies of New York. It is one of those great rewards for using company time to surf the web and one of the best pieces of punk-styled, hard-drinking, fairy-tale to come out in a long time.
 
 “Dinnie, an overweight enemy of humanity, was the worst violinist in New York, but was practicing gamely when two cute little fairies stumbled through his fourth-floor window and vomited on the carpet.” Now as first lines go you will need to accept, or at least acknowledge, how perfect that is, and one day you will realize that to be pure literary gold. 
 And perhaps it is simply nostalgia, perhaps it is just a predilection for allusion, reference, and pop-cultural sensibility, but the book is just fun to read. Really. Peaceful diplomatic missions escalate quickly into brawls and artistically minded individuals do battle over a neighborhood arts competition. If there is one prerequisite to a good story, it’s people being passionate about their life because the last thing anyone wants is some inactive, paragonic Rand-ian slug wandering a mall somewhere when he has no money. People need to be doing things, and in The Good Fairies, they do stuff. Oh how they do stuff. The stuff they do, oh my.
 
 Over the course of the book you’ll get a super-powered street-woman well versed in roman warfare, the rise of fae industrialism, fae post-industrialism, and fae communist rebellion. You will witness the exploits of the pair of aforementioned sprites as they incite every hard-luck tramp in New York to heights of fury, revenge, class struggle, and love. The combination of real-world and made up world, those illusions Millar splices to his allusions, are sewn seamlessly into the story, and the flight of fantasy that is armed insurrection against an imperial capitalist model is all more rewarding for his efforts on our behalf. 
 
 By the end we even get Johnny Thunders, late guitarist for the New York Dolls returning to earth from his place in heaven. Hell, even the nameless tramps who succumb to poverty and shuffle from the mortal coil are passionately lamented in these pages. If that isn’t an upbeat, positive message, well what is? But don’t take my word for it, take Neil Gaiman’s, he wrote the introduction, and then maybe you try reading the book.
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/581561?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

WADO's review
rating:

That anyone bothers surfing the internet on their own time is absurd. When you are not at work you could be eating, drinking, writing, playing baseball, taking karate, licking someone’s neck, looking at stars, getting into fights or cutting down cell phone towers. What the hell good is sitting down to a high-jacked internet connection if all you are going to do is read Pitchfork the entire night? Get serious about your time, and use those well-paid, or well, paid company hours at your job like the living economic cancer you are and look for great new writers, music, movies, and games. Start researching New Media Economic theory when you are supposed to be collating those reports and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Then go out there and find books like Martin Millar’s The Good Fairies of New York. It is one of those great rewards for using company time to surf the web and one of the best pieces of punk-styled, hard-drinking, fairy-tale to come out in a long time.
...more That anyone bothers surfing the internet on their own time is absurd. When you are not at work you could be eating, drinking, writing, playing baseball, taking karate, licking someone’s neck, looking at stars, getting into fights or cutting down cell phone towers. What the hell good is sitting down to a high-jacked internet connection if all you are going to do is read Pitchfork the entire night? Get serious about your time, and use those well-paid, or well, paid company hours at your job like the living economic cancer you are and look for great new writers, music, movies, and games. Start researching New Media Economic theory when you are supposed to be collating those reports and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Then go out there and find books like Martin Millar’s The Good Fairies of New York. It is one of those great rewards for using company time to surf the web and one of the best pieces of punk-styled, hard-drinking, fairy-tale to come out in a long time.

“Dinnie, an overweight enemy of humanity, was the worst violinist in New York, but was practicing gamely when two cute little fairies stumbled through his fourth-floor window and vomited on the carpet.” Now as first lines go you will need to accept, or at least acknowledge, how perfect that is, and one day you will realize that to be pure literary gold.
And perhaps it is simply nostalgia, perhaps it is just a predilection for allusion, reference, and pop-cultural sensibility, but the book is just fun to read. Really. Peaceful diplomatic missions escalate quickly into brawls and artistically minded individuals do battle over a neighborhood arts competition. If there is one prerequisite to a good story, it’s people being passionate about their life because the last thing anyone wants is some inactive, paragonic Rand-ian slug wandering a mall somewhere when he has no money. People need to be doing things, and in The Good Fairies, they do stuff. Oh how they do stuff. The stuff they do, oh my.

Over the course of the book you’ll get a super-powered street-woman well versed in roman warfare, the rise of fae industrialism, fae post-industrialism, and fae communist rebellion. You will witness the exploits of the pair of aforementioned sprites as they incite every hard-luck tramp in New York to heights of fury, revenge, class struggle, and love. The combination of real-world and made up world, those illusions Millar splices to his allusions, are sewn seamlessly into the story, and the flight of fantasy that is armed insurrection against an imperial capitalist model is all more rewarding for his efforts on our behalf.

By the end we even get Johnny Thunders, late guitarist for the New York Dolls returning to earth from his place in heaven. Hell, even the nameless tramps who succumb to poverty and shuffle from the mortal coil are passionately lamented in these pages. If that isn’t an upbeat, positive message, well what is? But don’t take my word for it, take Neil Gaiman’s, he wrote the introduction, and then maybe you try reading the book.
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message 1: by Andrea

02/15/2008 05:35PM

This review made me smile. Add me as a friend?