(no subject)

[skygiants]

I 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.

Comments

[sovay]

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 read it around the same time and rather bounced, but I am glad it still works for you!

(I have fond memories of Larque on the Wing. I hope but have no idea if that one would hold up at all.

[skygiants]

It would have been very easy for me to bounce, I think; there was a big mental space in which I put 'things that left a primary impression on me as ??!?? and which I then reread many times in an attempt to discover if they were still as ??!?? the next time, which they always were'

(Tanya Huff's incestuous body-swapping assassins fighting zombies books also went here)

[sovay]

(Tanya Huff's incestuous body-swapping assassins fighting zombies books also went here)

Sing the Four Quarters! Fifth Quarter! No Quarter! There was a fourth one a couple of years later but apparently it sucked!

Those books were an astonishing amount of id in a little bit of plot.

[coffeeandink]

I know I read this, but I don't remember much about it. The different directions Nancy Springer's writing takes fascinate me. Like, I would not have expected the turn to surreal feminist didacticism to come from the author of the relatively conventional and extremely homoerotic Celtic fantasies she started out with.

[skygiants]

I never read any other Nancy Springer, because I kept picking up her books in the library and attempting to fit the descriptions in with what I knew of Nancy Springer which was this one VERY SPECIFIC book, and they never did. But I got a couple others on Open Road Media sale so perhaps, someday, in the not-too-distant future!

[coffeeandink]

I think the first two books I read by Nancy Springer were *Chance and Other Gestures of the Hand of Fate* (startlingly nasty fairies and complex psychology) and *Madbond* (very low tech fantasy, not quite prehistorical, I think), which ... was a lot of castration encountered in a very short period of time, especially if you're 14.

[osprey_archer]

Nancy Springer is one of those authors whose books I have seen around but never actually read. This entry makes it seem like I'm missing out. How many books feature a brief stint of being buried alive? Let alone saving the world with a sparkly nightgown?

[skygiants]

NOT MANY. It has always stood out to me as a unique reading experience! Like if someone started a slam poem at a feminist poetry night in the year 1995 and then just sort of kept going over the course of the next year until it was a fully-formed fairy tale, with a plot and everything.

[cyphomandra]

I started reading Nancy Springer with the delightfully slashy The Silver Sun. None of her other fantasies quite matched up (also, I discovered fanfic) so the next time I read a lot of her books was when I was going through a children/YA pony book phase (A Horse to Love, Not on a White Horse, They're All Named Wildfire etc), which hit a different but also satisfying emotional kink.

Somewhere in between the two phases I read Fair Peril and was a bit baffled :D I liked many of the elements! It was just... the book... hmm.

(also, I have just checked to see what she's writing now, and her latest, The Oddling Prince has a beautiful mysterious fey young man showing up, so I have borrowed it from the library in a fit of nostalgia)

[jothra]

I think I read this?? Somewhere in the haze that was me reading every bizarre 90s fantasy novel my library had. Except for the Anne McCaffrey.