Allyse Near

Isola Wilde is a 21st century teenager, living on the edge of a wood with her emotionally-distant father, her house-bound mother, and the brother-princes that only Isola can see. (None of whom are actually brothers, or princes, and not all of them are even male - they consist two ghosts, a Fury, a mermaid and a faerie,) But everything changes when Isola finds a dead girl in the wood.

The backcover describes this rather aptly as a "deliciously dark bubblegum-gothic fairytale". The writing is absolutely gorgeous. I liked the way it plays around with fairytales, and the way it incorporates Victorian Gothic references. I liked Isola's brother-princes, especially Alejandro.

The story becomes just a bit too dark, just a tiny bit too Gothic, for my liking, so it is hard to know how much I liked it as a whole. I'd definitely recommend it to others, because other people draw the line between too dark and not too dark differently to me.

She paused, squinting at her cloudy reflection in the glass and for a moment she felt like a blurred-out identity, a shadow half-glimpsed on a wall. Anonymous Wilde.
"Mirror, mirror on the wall," she breathed around the sticky air in her lungs, "who's the fairest of them all?"
Words appeared in the fog, letters traced in the mirror by the clever fingers of some old magic trapped in the walls:
TEENAGE GIRLS ARE ALL UNFAIR.… (más)

REVIEW ALSO ON: http://bibliomantics.com/2013/09/06/fantasy-girls-gone-wilde-cassie-la-is-enchan...

As a whole, Fairytales for Wilde Girls is a charming love letter to fairy tales and all the intriguing and dark parts of the world, real and imaginary. Complete with unicorns, faeries, dark and stormy nights, evil witches, first loves, magic, poetry and the heavy weights of the gothic literature world this novel has everyone and everything.

Our heroine is Isola Wilde, who if written the wrong way she could be a most unlikeable protagonist. She’s quirky, she has some gothic sensibilities, she has the ability to talk to members of the fairy world and has fantastical friends and normally that would drive my crazy, but rather than hating Isola for being a trying too hard phony you immediately like her.

Named after Oscar Wilde’s deceased sister, Isola Wilde who passed when she was a child, Isola has been taught all her life to live extra hard, for both her and her namesake who died too young.

The happy, carefree life that Isola has built around herself begins to crumble when she finds a dead girl in the woods, a princess to be precise inside a birdcage who was being held captive there by a witch who forced her to sing until she died. Upset by Isola’s loudly beating heart, the princess returns as a angry spirit to take her pain out on Isola, the girl who can see her and the girl who is lucky enough to be alive, all the while singing in her ruined and ragged voice. Terrifying!

In something akin to a security blanket, Isola surrounds herself with her protectors, or what she calls her Brother-Princes inspired by her childhood fairy tale “The Seventh Princess.”

There’s her first brother, the Victorian London cutie Alejandro who died in an opium den, the frightening spirit of vengeance the Fury Ruslana, Rosekin the dramatic faerie, her lanky childhood friend James Sommerwell, mermaid and possible serial-killer Christobelle and of course, the ghost of Grandpa Furlong and his pet spider Dame Furlong.

I’m slightly partial to Christobelle the mermaid because one she’s a mermaid and two, despite being spurned by love as evidenced by the blood pearls which are woven into her pink hair she’s still a hopeless romantic at heart. Or maybe I just love her dark, tragic back story more than anything.

Isola’s creation of the Brother-Princes runs parallel to the story within the story by the fictional authoress Lileo Pardieu who writes tales of “girls who kill, girls who are killed, girls who are alive and girls who are otherwise.” In the tale, a beautiful princess i stolen by some dragons and her six brothers and their various talents head out into the wilderness to save their beloved sister with disastrous consequences. Consequences that beautifully parallel the main story occurring in Wilde Girls.

Other stories within the main book include lilting tales about unicorns seeking revenge. You’ll never look at unicorns the same way again.

And that’s not just to say the novel is only full of fantastical and horrifying events. It’s also incredibly witty. Isola makes reference to people doing things like as drinking “Dickensian helpings of gin” and dating advice from her mother that suggest “never pick the beast or the wolf on the off-chance he won’t devour you.” Isola’s school, St. Dymphna’s (who is the patron saint of the mentally ill, true story) has a tournament every year between teams divided into Arthur and Guinevere houses while Isola decides to make her own team who she dubs Team Mordred. And she even has a crazy friend who is under the impression that Kurt Cobain is merely between records rather than gravestones.

Don’t worry lovers of obscure religious trivia, there’s also references to St. Dominic the patron saint of juvenile delinquents, petty criminals, teen anarchists and “terribly sad people about to commit an in changeable act.” Dominic died at the age of 15 with the dying words, “What beautiful things I see” upon his lips. Just thought I’d throw that in there.

Besides being an enriching modern day fairy tale and a terrifying horror story about the secrets we keep hidden from ourselves, Near’s book is also a treasure hunt of allusions. Isola lives in the town of Avalon (the island in the Arthurian legend) and the nearby woods are dubbed Vivien’s Woods after Vivien, AKA the Lady of the Lady AKA Nimue. And who else lives in Avalon but the shut-in doomsday hermit Boo Radley and Isola’s next door neighbors Edgar Allan Poe and his brothers and sisters Puck, Portia and Cassio.

There’s also references to Annabelle Lee, Alice Liddell, Cinderella, The Virgin Suicides, the most beautiful word in the English language according to J.R.R. Tolkien “cellar door,” the Sword of Damocles, Madame Guillotine, Orpheus and his Underworld wife Eurydice, Sylvia Plath and even Batman. And those are just the ones I remembered.

Near will have you hooked from page one with her rich and inventive prose, keep your reading with her compelling story, and have you gripped all the way to the end. At which point you will then have to immediately re-read the novel because that plot twist. Then you might cry because she’s only 24 and her debut novel is perfection.… (más)