Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
The Godmother (1995)
Author: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Genre: Fantasy (Fairy Tales)
Plot Summary:
Rose Samson is a social worker in Seattle, fighting burn-out and the clueless bureaucracy of her new boss. When she meets Felicity Fortune, a classy older dame in purple and gray, she assumes that her claims of being a fairy godmother are just the ramblings of a well-behaved lunatic. But when Rose wishes goodness for the whole city, strange coincidences start leading to cosmic justice. The lives of Rose’s clients start mirroring those of fairy tales – Sno, the rock star’s daughter lost in the woods, is saved by seven disgruntled Vietnam vets; Hank and Gigi, abandoned by their mother, are taken in by a guy with a candy house; and Fred the cop is turning out to be kind of a Prince Charming.
Geographical Setting: Seattle, Washington
Time Period: present (mid-1990s – pre-Starbucks and Microsoft!)
Series: Fairy Godmother #1 of 3
Appeal Characteristics:
The major appeal of this book is the re-telling of fairy tales in a contemporary urban setting. Scarborough’s tone is usually light, although when she deals with heavier subject matter (pedophilia, gang violence), she gets more serious. The story is not particularly fast-paced and characters spend a lot of time explaining their backgrounds to each other; but the book is still a real page-turner because the story is so compelling. Rose is a well-developed character – cynical without being bitter, the kind of gal for whom you root. Secondary characters are quirky and interesting, even after you realize they’re all characters in those old familiar fairy tales.
Read-alikes: Although not the light-hearted fantasy of The Godmother, Scarborough is most famous for the Nebula-award winning The Healer’s War (1988), about a nurse’s fantastic journey through the jungles of Vietnam. Better read-alikes are the two other Fairy Godmother novels, which feature some of the secondary characters from the first: The Godmother’s Apprentice (1995) follows Snohomish Quantrill to Ireland; in The Godmother’s Web (1999), Cindy Ellis encounters some Native American fairy godmother magic in the Southwest. Another author to try is Robin McKinley; start with Beauty (1978), a light-hearted retelling of Beauty and the Beast featuring strong female characters. Fairy tales: a series of fantasy novels retelling classic tales, a series whose title is pretty self-explanatory, starts with Steven Brust’s The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars (1987), about a Hungarian gypsy trying to restore the heavens; the series continues with retellings of Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, Tam Lin, and others (there are eight of them by various authors). Finally, Neil Gaiman has written a few funny books about old stories in the modern world: try American Gods (2001), which follows the gods of many religions around America.
Red Flags: Although this is not a dark book overall, there is at least one violent fight scene and a thinly-veiled scene of child sexual abuse.
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