Fairy Bad Day ~ Amanda Ashby

Fairy Bad Day
Speak
June 9, 2011
352 pages
Goodreads/Amazon


Fairy Bad Day by Amanda Ashby is full of fairies, dragons, other supernatural beings . . . and the teenagers that slay them. Emma has known her whole life that she’s going to be a dragon slayer. It’s her destiny.

Except when it comes time for the students at Burtonwood Academy, Emma’s school to receive their assignments, Curtis gets the job Emma sees as hers.

And Emma is made a fairy slayer. The first. Students’ aren’t made fairy slayers because the annoying little things, in band tees and jeans aren’t seen as a real threat.

Emma sees her fairy slayer designation as an insult.

Then she sees a giant killer fairy.

And it looks like the only person who can help her is cute, charming, but so incredibly annoying to Emma, Curtis who stole her spot.


This novel brings Buffy (be it the television series or the Season 8 told through the graphic novels) a bit: The characters have powers that the general populace does not know about, powers that they come into at some age or another, and there’s a character where they all are together and safe and trained. (I guess this could be seen as Harry Potter or something else, but I’m going with Buffy.)

At first Fairy Bad Day can seem more like a middle grade novel, than a young adult novel—due to some of the characters actions, or lack thereof—but you have to remember that the characters are all 15-years-old. They’re simply acting their age. A lot of YA novels tend to have characters act older than their age-or at least on the higher end of how teens that age do act—but Fairy Bad Day does a great job of keeping the characters real and age-appropriate without making them seem naïve or incorrectly innocent.

With humor, magnificent character relationships and a main character that grows brilliantly through the course of the novel, Fairy Bad Day is a great novel. (With more depth than the cover leads you to believe but still all the fun.)

This is also a great book for all the readers that haven’t quite gotten into the fae love with all of the faery books published as of late. Those in this book are different. You’re not supposed to find them sexy or crazy charming or anything of the like.

(Fear not, though, if you do love the fae, you can still really enjoy Fairy Bad Day - I did.)

8/10