The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

 

So this story takes a while to get going, but when it eventually does, it goes some interesting and mostly cheerful places. There's more than a little authorial insertion, because it's hard to write something so knowingly about fiction without going at least a little meta (I'm pretty sure the book's more about secondary-world fantasy than it is about fairy tales, no matter what it says, but that's probably not important). The characters are reasonably well-drawn, and it's probably a sort of comment on the heteronormativity of genre that the Important Couple here are queer (if possibly bi, and poly, though neither of those is anything like explicit in the text). The ghost city in the middle of the fantasy setting honestly reminded me a lot of the "hell" in What Dreams May Come, but maybe a little less interesting (if not so lame in the end) but I'm sure ideas like that are floating around in the collective subconscious there for the taking. It's a pretty good novel, not anything deathless or earthshaking, I'm glad I grabbed it out of the books my wife was going to take back to the library.