Cricket is a human child who was swapped as baby with a fairy infant and now lives as ward of the Fairy Queen. She uses him for her own purposes; he tolerates her casual cruelty because she protects him and has created a cloak that helps him suppress his dangerous magic. But as he approaches his 13th Change Day, he knows he must prove his worth or be banished from her tower. Finding a final piece of his cloak will let him do that.
When a knight whom Cricket saw in a prophecy falls into Fairyland, Cricket senses that the stranger can help lead Cricket to the missing cloak piece. The knight, who calls himself Isaac, is a young soldier from the Great War who has been cursed with an icy armor spreading over his body. He doesn’t know where he is or why he’s there, but senses a friend in Cricket, who is willing to help him try to break the curse. Together, they discover that there’s more to Fairyland than they knew—and Cricket learns that some of his long-held beliefs about the world and about the Fairy Queen might not be as true as he had thought.
The well-paced story gradually reveals pieces of the duo’s backstories even as they each begin to question what they have been taught about themselves and the world. I’ll avoid major spoilers, but will note that Isaac was bullied by peers and parents for being gay; he escaped by becoming a soldier. Cricket, for his part, has a magic that leads him to wonder at one point, “What if you were mostly a boy but only some of the time?” In another scene, he feels “a pang of jealousy” as he watches some other creatures “shifting from men to women and everything in between.” Author Sarah Jean Horwitz smartly doesn’t make gender fluidity just a matter of magic, however; at one point, Cricket realizes that “humans, too, could be more than just one thing or another” and that “His entire world was made up of people who could be so many different things. Boy, girl, neither, both.” The plot doesn’t center on his gender fluidity, though, but makes it part of his larger, growing self-awareness. One other secondary character uses they/them pronouns.
Horwitz draws upon European fairy tale traditions and motifs, but adds some original components and twists to create a gripping story of found family, belonging, self-discovery, and empowerment. An (initially) unknown narrator helps set the scene and gives an extra bit of mystery, while creations like a floating jack-o’-lantern ship and a herd of feral bicycles add humor. It’s whimsical but with an edge, like all good fairy tales, and highly recommended.
Cricket, Isaac, and the Fairy Witch are White; several other characters are people (or fae) of color.
