Diary of a Teenage Faërie Princess by C.B. Smith

The press release places the book in the Young Adult Urban Fantasy category.  I do enjoy books in this genre but I am a bit older than the target audience and did not enjoy this book as much as I had hoped.

The premise is interesting.  Jaynie is almost seventeen years old.  She has red hair, a temper, and big toes so large that she can’t find shoes at Bigguns Shoe Emporium to fit.  She discovers a mysterious magical trunk with a picture of a woman who can only be her mother.  Jaynie begins asking her father questions only to learn that her mother is a Faërie Queen who disappeared thirteen years ago and may still be alive.  The novel chronicles Jaynie’s dual journies to find her mother and to grow up.

None of the characters came alive for me which may have been due to some poorly timed descriptions.  As one example, Leo – a lover of Jaynie’s, is introduced to the reader and it’s twelve pages later that we find out his features are koala-esque.  Does this mean he simply looked like a koala or was Jayne’s normal world inhabited by animal/human hybrids?  Leo is nocturnal and likes to sleep in Eucalyptus trees which implies the latter.

The plot skips around a little bit and some details get mixed up.  For example, Jaynie’s existence for several years is as a nomadic traveler who ends up in Dumas, New York.  In another section she’s only known her aunt, her father and the town of Dumas.

There are some imaginative touches such as the faërie world being underneath the world we live in.  In order to get to the faërie world Jaynie is shrunk to acorn size to fit through the entry point.  Dragonflies are called Zipwhizzers and used for transportation.  A magical weapon called the Fjärdmir saber makes an appearance that Jayne affectionately names Big Effer (for good reasons).

The first chapter is available on Amazon but be forewarned it has little to do with the rest of the novel.