Fairy trees… #Oxford #fairies #FaeryMagic #trees #treesofinstagram

Fairy houses or fungi…? @evenleywoodgarden #fungi #fairies #Autumn????

Okay, I’m looking for the names of brother and sister #fairies/#huldufólk children for my next novel. If there’s a reference to old English myth then so much the better… #amplotting #amwriting #ImaginaryFriends #MrTumnal3

I knew that Dumbledore was another name for bumblebees; what I didn’t know was the link between bumblebees and fairies. Appropriate. ????
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#bumblebees #dumbledore #fairies #KatyBell #Summer @melissa_jharrison

If your Dad was 22 when you were born because his life goes in 11s but by the time he was 33 you were already 13 because things were already broken what with you being a boy not a girl at what age could you be a grandma to an 18 year old and how old would your Dad be? #fairies #amplotting #ImaginaryFriends

Seeing the whale on the wall of @lazenby.rachel’s new house reminds me that we’ve had #fairies hiding behind the books in the study ever since we moved in 10 years ago! ????

#Autumn???? is the magical time of year when, if you bend an ear and listen, you can hear the #fairies scamper through the leaves… #MrTumnal

Emma therapy… Building a garden for fairies
#fairies #fairygarden

A lot of the books that feature can portray as either mischievous and evil, or flights of fancy and fun. This book is neither. When Alice is sent to stay with a grandmother she barely knows who lives in the middle of a dark, foreboding wood, she is at first alone, and the ancient trees only seem to strangle the light and the hope from her.

Then she meets a new friend who seems to be living in the woods and her own modern day drama of her brother fighting for his life in hospital collides with a tragic past revealed in letters that goes back to the war, and also the reasons for her Dad leaving her gran’s house all those years ago.

The fairies connect the stories together, and although we never actually meet one, they seem a lot more real than lesser-fairy fiction and more like the real huldufolk of Norse mythology. With dark woods, fairy magic, and a very twenty-first century threat this is a powerful story to enjoy and make you think about.

Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer

I’ve always loved stories of fairies, elves, and the hidden people, but in truth whenever I think of them I imagine them living a simpler, more rural, rustic way of life tucked away out of sight of the 21st century. But why shouldn’t they have the same (or greater) Tech than we do. And that is the central conceit behind the Artemis Fowl books.

Even so, where I love the fairies the most is when we get to see how ordinary and recognisable features of our landscape are revealed to be the cover for their cities or arterial routes – not when they are racing around the sci-fi world.

In some respects this book, the second in the series, falls down because of that. Artemis himself is still a bit of an anti-hero sorting out the after effects of book oneand the story is a rollercoaster of ideas against a simple – possibly too simple – story of an attempt to rescue a lost father.

It’s an enjoyable romp nonetheless.

]]> https://shepline.com/2014/01/08/of-action-adventure-and-fairies-with-tech/feed/ 0 https://shepline.com/2013/02/26/in-love-with-fairies/ https://shepline.com/2013/02/26/in-love-with-fairies/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:33:15 +0000 http://journal.shepline.com/?p=2555 Emma’s mum and dad saw Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty when it was on in London and loved it so much that decided too take us to see it when can’t on your to High Wycombe. Now to be fair I don’t much about this ballet. I had forgotten that it was Tchaikovsky and I always get the stories of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White muddled up in my brain. I also knew that Matthew Bourne had a reputation for doing things a bit differently but had little idea what to expect. What we saw was outstandingly brilliant. I haven’t seen much ballet, fearing I think that I wouldn’t understand it. How wrong could I be!

The production was a true Gothic romance with  sumptuous sets and costumes, ingenious effects, and lighting. Starting story in the late nineteenth century it is a world inhabited by witches,  magic, and fairies and moves on to the present day – the everlasting fairies a link with the past.

I’ve discovered three things. Firstly, that ballet can every so much as brilliant as theatre. Secondly, that I really do like Tchaikovsky – I think he might one of my desert island composers. And lastly, that I am just a little bit in love with (okay a lot in love with…) the idea of fairies. Good fairies and bad they make a story.