Book Review: Fairy Tale

TITLE: Fairy Tale
AUTHOR: Cyn Balog
PUBLISHED: 2009
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: faeries, romance, drama
PREMISE: A teen oracle discovers her boyfriend is a changling and that the faeries want him back.
MY REVIEW: First I will say I love Balog's creativity. She manages to not use the same tired idea over and over again. She also seems to actually understand how teenagers act and behave so her portrayel of high school is pretty accurate. She's also got some nice writing in there and manages to put in some thoughtful things.
However, before I can say she's excellent she needs to work on two things: her main female characters and her endings. Her main female characters tend to flip flop. A LOT. This MC especially I couldn't figure out who she was because her personality did one-eighties all the time. First she would be sardonic and sassy and I would love her but then suddenly these out of no where insecurities popped up and she'd be the "oh my guy is so hot, why on earth is he with ME? He deserves so much better!" kind of girl. Which is SUCH a trope and one that I hate (FYI I hate it when it's guys doing it with their girlfriends too). Then there are the plot turns. First, she has the tendancy to go for the predictable endings and the endings tend to wrap up way to abruptly in my opinion.
If Balog would work on those two things, then I bet her books would improve by leaps and bounds. Compared to this, Sleepless was better so she is definitely improving which makes me eager to read her future work. This is a nice twist in the faerie book genre anyway. The ending makes me think that perhaps Balog is leaving room for a sequel which I'm all for.
WHO SHOULD READ: faerie book fans, fans of Tithe, fans of Sleepless
MY RATING: Four out of Five changelings