I found this book difficult to get through. The characters were flat and I periodically lost track of who was who. I love the premise and that's what kept me going through. The final explanation wasn't much of one. And what's with all these humans eating and drinking and sleeping in Fairy? You're not supposed to be able to do that without grave repercussions. Fooey. ( )

Eher 1 1/2 Punkte als 2, aber was soll's. Ein vielversprechendes Buch, eine interessante Prämisse, aber irgendwie kommt das Buch nicht vom Boden hoch; die Story eiert über Kapitel und Kapitel dahin ohne wirklich in Fahrt zu kommen, keine wirkliche Spannung, immer der gleiche dröge Tonfall, egal was gerade passiert ("hey cool", he said; "oh yeah," I said ...), kaum zu glauben, dass das Buch den Mythopoetic Award gewonnen haben soll.
Schluss, aus, kein Wort mehr davon, es muss ja schließlich auch unterdurchschnittliche Bücher geben. ( )

I wanted to like this book more than I did. Unfortunately a marked similarity to John Cowley's Little, Big - a far superior novel on every count - made it hard to overlook the weaknesses.

Will Taylor becomes involved with the charmed Feierabend family in the early seventies. But there's more to the family than meets the eye, and he's going to find himself swept up in the world of the fairies.

In fairness, The Uncertain Places is not a bad book, it's just very middling, and the plot is super, super similar to John Cowley's book Little, Big - also concerning the multi-decadal involvement of one family with fairies. Whilst Cowley's novel may have had a somewhat meandering narrative, it is indisputably a work of literature (arguably a major one), and it threw the flaws of this book into sharp relief.

The problem starts with the characterisation, which is not very strong. Will's voice (the book is written in first person) is mostly believable and interesting, but all the other characters seemed shallow to me. It doesn't help that the narrative is one where Things Happen to people, rather than people driving the story. This makes for very reactive characters, always responding in understandable-but-predictable ways to things. It also crowds out a lot of charactersation because the characters never really get to respond to each other, they are always responding to Things, even with each other, and I never got to see sides of these people that would exist away from the main narrative.

The prose itself is utilitarian. I know I'm harping on, but one of the great strengths of Little, Big was its dream-like, heady prose - perfectly suited to a tale of the fey. The Uncertain Places had prose better suited to a much more pedestrian topic, and I couldn't help feeling it rendered the fantastic into the suburban at times.

The predictable shape of the narrative didn't help matters. This is a very narrative driven book, but I felt it lacked a lot of complexity, in favour of an episodic, and-then-and-then-and-then approach. The callbacks weren't subtle or interesting enough, the interface with fairy tales was often clunky or obvious - and I say this as someone who *loves* fairy tales, and has a very deep knowledge of them.

I mean, the book is innocent enough in itself, but I was left wanting more on every count except for length - the opposite to how it should be, really. ( )

I did think this story was quite interesting, though in a lot of ways it seemed like a throwback to the kind of intersection-between-our-world-and-the-faerie-realm stories I was reading when I was in high school in the early 90s, and not just because chunks were set in the 80s. It was a bit meandering, and for all the little moments where I recognized bits of folklore and fairy tale that I knew, there were moments were the story stuttered in pacing and failed to engage me. Where it really succeeded for me, though, was on the level of metaphor--youth as exciting and adventurous, then growing up and losing that and wondering if it had actually been all that you remembered it being. ( )

This fairy-tale inspired novel begins in 1971, when a friend introduces Berkeley student Will to lovely Livvy and the Feierebrand family of three sisters and a mother. The novel starts wonderfully, with a partly creepy, partly enticing description of the family's rambling, architecturally jumbled house in the hills of Napa Valley. The family is sort of spacey and odd, but charming and clearly affluent. Will falls for Livvy, despite the secrets that seem to be kept that have to do with the family's apparent lack of necessity to work, their expectation of good luck, and strange, scary short men who appear around the land and others that show up in the middle of the night to clean the house. Will and his friend Ben can't leave the mystery alone, and as secrets begin to be revealed, Will discovers that sometimes fairy tales and luck have prices attached. The novel has a bit of romance, but is mostly mysterious and vaguely sinister modern day fairy tale. The Grimm brothers feature in its backstory. Beware of bargains with fairies. Or maybe don't beware, but just think deeply about your ethics before making agreements. The problem I had with the book is that in the last half of the book, way too much gets crammed into a short space of pages. I got overwhelmed with the various fairy tale aspects, journeys, and goings on. I wasn't attached to any of the characters besides Will; Livvy was an emotional cipher; the philosophical aspects were supposed to provide deeper meaning, I think, but I was bored. It lost my engagement 2/3 of the way through. ( )