The Godmother by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

ISBN 0-441-00269-2

Ace Fantasy - Berkley Publishing Group

A wonderful dark urban fantasy with a twist of hope running through this delightful tale and human darkness and hope.

The book is an old one and I'm not sure if there is an up to date release, so the information such as the ISBN and publisher are from an edition released in 1994.

Urban fantasy has become a popular genre with the works of Kim Harrison and Laurel K. Hamilton, but before either of them became popular there was The God Mother, by Ms Scarborough.

In Seattle a social worker by the name of Rose Samson dons a crystal pendant from her friend's vintage clothing shop and makes a wish for a fairy godmother to save 'the whole damned city'. Rose, of course, doesn't believe in fairy tales, she's seen too many souls twisted and warped by those with evil in their hearts and even now her case load leaves her desk creaking with the amount of files on her plate.

Enter Felicity Fortune, with her silver hair, strange clothes and unbelievable magical powers. She is here to grant Rose's wish, but it might be too great a task for even one with Felicity's powers.

Ms Scarborough takes four well known fairy tales and turns them into very modern settings of dark deeds and fear. Cinderella, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel all make their appearance, along with a little help from Puss in Boots. Only in this case Cinderella is a stable hand with two evil rich step sisters determined to get her fired from her job. Snow White is the daughter of a rock star whose step mother fears she will over take her as a model, yet Snow, or rather Sno, has no interest in such things. Puss helps a street kid, who is trying to scrape a living together. And Hansel and Gretel stumble into the hands of a pedophile connected to the head of the department where Rose works.

Ms. Scarborough pulls no punches with her story, and does little to hide the darkness that exists in the world around us. We might well think that the original Fairy Tales, not the ones shown by Disney, or the versions that appear in books today, were gruesome, but the modern one this talented author creates for us is equally gritty.

If you're looking for a book that will both delight and shock you, and yet remind you of the spark of goodness that still exists in the world, then this is the book for you. It's both engaging and well written, a book I found hard to put down.