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Nov. 21st, 2018 11:14 pmI watched the back half of the Kristy Swanson Buffy movie with my parents tonight, which reminded me that I recently reread Fair Peril, a 1996 novel by Nancy Springer that also has a protagonist named Buffy (which is how you know it's from 1996).
I first read Fair Peril ... probably some time pretty shortly after 1996 and it definitely Made An Impression on me as a relatively young person.
The premise: middle-aged Buffy is depressed, divorced, distant from her teen/adult children, and attempting to follow her dream of becoming a professional storyteller.
Things start looking up when she finds a talking frog that claims to be a prince, who is clearly perfect for her storytelling act!
... things start looking down again when the frog convinces Buffy's teen daughter Emily to kiss him back into a prince and run away with him to the mall, now transformed into a Jungian fairytale space haunted by an evil queen, various courtiers, and a giant menacing frog with tiny wings who symbolizes toxic masculinity.
Buffy promptly flips off and sets out, armed with a sparkly nightgown, a magic book from the local library, and a lot of second-wave feminism, to rescue Emily from the perilous mall. This leads to a number of adventures, including:
- accidentally turning her coworker, a nice gay children's librarian, into a frog
- accidentally turning her cartoonishly evil ex-husband into a fog while TRYING to turn him into a frog
- a brief stint of being arrested
- a brief stint of being buried alive
- a long period of grappling with motherhood as represented by herself, her aging and abused mother, her evil (and apparently magical) mother-in-law, and the fairy queen
- quite a lot of shouting at every magical entity she comes across
In the end, everyone learns an important lesson about archetypes, parenting, and intergenerational feminism. Also, LeeVon the nice gay children's librarian finds true love. It is not at all a subtle book and very much of its time, but I can absolutely see why it made an impression on a small child who loved Into the Woods and I still have a great deal of fondness for it.
I first read Fair Peril ... probably some time pretty shortly after 1996 and it definitely Made An Impression on me as a relatively young person.
The premise: middle-aged Buffy is depressed, divorced, distant from her teen/adult children, and attempting to follow her dream of becoming a professional storyteller.
Things start looking up when she finds a talking frog that claims to be a prince, who is clearly perfect for her storytelling act!
... things start looking down again when the frog convinces Buffy's teen daughter Emily to kiss him back into a prince and run away with him to the mall, now transformed into a Jungian fairytale space haunted by an evil queen, various courtiers, and a giant menacing frog with tiny wings who symbolizes toxic masculinity.
Buffy promptly flips off and sets out, armed with a sparkly nightgown, a magic book from the local library, and a lot of second-wave feminism, to rescue Emily from the perilous mall. This leads to a number of adventures, including:
- accidentally turning her coworker, a nice gay children's librarian, into a frog
- accidentally turning her cartoonishly evil ex-husband into a fog while TRYING to turn him into a frog
- a brief stint of being arrested
- a brief stint of being buried alive
- a long period of grappling with motherhood as represented by herself, her aging and abused mother, her evil (and apparently magical) mother-in-law, and the fairy queen
- quite a lot of shouting at every magical entity she comes across
In the end, everyone learns an important lesson about archetypes, parenting, and intergenerational feminism. Also, LeeVon the nice gay children's librarian finds true love. It is not at all a subtle book and very much of its time, but I can absolutely see why it made an impression on a small child who loved Into the Woods and I still have a great deal of fondness for it.
