Parenthetical

When Lucy was small, her mother went crazy and disappeared, leaving her in the care of her beloved foster parents. She doesn’t believe it, of course, when she finds pages from her mother’s diary claiming that the family has been under an Elfin Knight’s curse for centuries — each woman is doomed to get pregnant at seventeen, give birth to a daughter, and immediately go insane. But now Lucy herself is seventeen and pregnant, and she, her foster parents, and the boy next door team up to solve the riddle and break the curse.

The riddles are a version of the song “Scarborough Fair,” popularized by Simon & Garfunkel. I absolutely love that Lucy and her family go about solving them with logic rather then magic. There are no accidental discoveries or “I just knew it was right” b.s. here; they research and think and experiment and use the interwebs and solve every riddle their own damn selves. (MINOR SPOILER ALERT: the solution to “no seams or needlework” is, of course, felting. I hope when I’m under a faerie curse the answer to the riddle is homemade jam.)

Unfortunately a lot of this book makes less sense than the riddle solutions, and I often found the characters (with the exception of Lucy’s parents, who kick ass) eye-rollingly foolish, or sweet, or evil, or whatever template they drew from. It’s a hell of a page-turning supernatural romance, though, I’ll give it that. Definitely worth a few hours of your life if that’s your thing.

Also reviewed at: Harmony Book Reviews, The Book Smugglers, and Angieville (who took the words right out of my brain with the similarity to Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin).