The first book I read for my fifty books in a year challenge.

Fairest is a book about Aza, a girl with a very pretty singing voice but a far less than attractive face. She lives in a country where everything important is done with song and instead of balls they have 'sings'. She was found as a baby by an Innkeeper and his wife. They raised her as one of their own along with their own children. Early in her teenage years, Aza learns that she can project her voice to another place that is close by and make it sound like a voice she has already heard. She calls this Ilusing. When Aza is fifteen, a dutchess stops at the inn on her way to the king's wedding. Her traveling companion, Dame Ethele, is sick, so the dutchess opts to take Aza with her instead, since Ethele's clothes with fit her and the dutchess had always been friendly to Aza. After the wedding, the king gets injured at a banquet. Ivi, the new queen, is left to rule the kingdom alone, with her horrible singing voice that she has explained away by saying she has a cold. Ivi catches Aza ilusinging, makes Aza her lady-in-waiting and forces her to ilusing for her, so that the people will never know that she has a horrible singing voice. This is where Aza's problems begin.


It was very nice to start this out with a book I really enjoyed. Overall I really liked the book. I could have done with about 100 more pages though. Things move incredibly fast and the ending is rushed. I really enjoyed Levine's writing style. This book inspired me to read more of her work.

Normally, I think every creative endeavor can be improved through the addition of gayness. But strangely, I think this book is much more engaging and winning when it is focusing on how the narrator's religion (they are fundamentalist Christians in 1960's England), isolates her and her mother from the rest of the world.

The gay coming out and being rejected by family and friends is so old and done. It bores me.

I like the fantasy story bits when they don't too directly parallel the events of the plot. When they're a little en point, they are overly obvious as a cute storytelling technique, rather than illuminating something one didn't already understand.

I really, really enjoyed this. Very clearly written, hilarious, devastating, woven so seamlessly into fairytale ... very sexy, very tragic.

Beauty and the Beast is my all-time favorite fairy tale and Ms. Mckinley does an excellent job of making the story a little longer as she retells it for a new generation.