Signe Pike had the life that high-powered girls aim towards–an editor at a prominent publishing house, living in NYC with a big apt, and a kooky, clear-eyed neighbor.  Sounds like the set-up for the next Sandra Bullock/Jennifer Aniston chick-flick vehicle.  Instead, rather than searching for a man, Pike gives it all up to go looking for faeries, wanting to understand where they’ve gone, and why people don’t believe in them anymore, especially in a time of so much world doom and apocalyptic gloom.

The bulk of Pike’s story focuses on her travels, first in Mexico, then England, Ireland, and Scotland over the course of one summer.  Pike is thorough in her research, visiting people and places important to the world of faery believers, including the Isle of Man and Brian Froud, of The Dark Crystal and Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairies.  She dives into her project with the open-mind necessary for other worldly investigations, allowing herself to be led into the understand of belief.  Meetings and conversations with folklorists and believers are taken as seriously as though she is discussing religion with scholars.  All of her locations are picked out with informed care, Glastonbury Tor, The Fairy Bridge on the Isle of Man, Druid Mountain, and Findhorn in Scotland, and she kept detailed notes about her travels.

The greatest weakness of the book is Pike’s own writing, clearly influenced by her years of editing ‘chick-lit’ books, along the lines of Sophie Kinsella and books about Cinderella-wannabes.  At times, it feels a little like ‘Bridget Jones Does Faeries’.  Some of the circumstances she draws together seem tenuous.  The best parts are when Pike shows off her brain, describing the history and modern realities of her locations, and when she loses her fear, ditches the Bridget Jones mask, and becomes at peace with her surroundings.

Pike had lost her father, with whom she’d had a fraught childhood relationship, only a few years before, and, more than anything, this book seems to be her dealing with her grief, trying to recapture magic and innocence in the face of having lost a parent, when one can never be a child again.  Some of these parts and memories are woven into the faery narrative, but some of it is a little clunky.  It works as a rationale for the reason for the book, but Pike doesn’t come to any new conclusions about her father’s death through this trip, so it doesn’t fit seamlessly in with the rest of the book.

It might not make everyone a believer in faeries, but it is nice to entertain the idea that a shy orangutan-fairy lives out in my backyard and watches over my house.  And Pike’s sweet and adult approach to a marginalized, and sometimes silly subject, makes the book time well-spent.

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