Faerie

(Paperback)

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Description

Age range 14 to 17

Just days before her eighteenth birthday, Lila has resolved to end her life. The horror of becoming an adult, and leaving her childhood behind, has broken her heart. Faerie, a novel for young people, is the fierce yet gently unfolding story of a hyper- imaginative girl who is on a collision course to womanhood. She likens herself to a half-human fairy creature who does not belong in the earthly world; but in the cold light of day she is a psychiatric patient at a hospital, where she is being treated for anorexiaher sickness driven by the irrational need to undo nature and thwart the passage of time. Lila tells the story of how she ended up on the Four East wing: we flashback to her childhood in the '80s, growing up in a small town as an overweight brown kid to Punjabi immigrant parents: her father, a literary scholar whom she idolizes, and her mother, a housewife"the most female of all females who found comfort in cooking." Faerie weaves these passages with Lila's downward spiral into life-threatening illness, her budding sexuality, and her complicated recovery in hospital that comes with a price. Written with candour and heartbreaking lyricism, Faerie is a plaintive love letter to the bold, flawed splendour that is childhood.

Reviews

Marjara, writing in Lila's affecting voice, delicately captures the deep insecurities of teenhood, the pressure of trying to fit into one ideal of beauty, and the complexity of anorexia with lovely, flowing prose, underscoring the devastating effects that mental illness can have an an entire family. --Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)

Faerie is intensely intimate, containing details that will ring resoundingly true for anyone who has ever suffered with an eating disorder. The strange combination of self-hatred that fuels extreme weight loss and pride that comes from the sensation of feeling nothing but hard bone under the skin is achingly true-to-life, but not glorified. --Quill and Quire

This important account provides a mirror where as yet there is none. --Kirkus Reviews

Marjara delivers a provocative and traumatic rendering of a young woman's battle with her own body ... There's an authentic feel to the writing; Lila's rage, her lived horror, is palpable. --Vancouver Sun

Among the novel's many accomplishments, besides being a compelling one-sitting read, is the insight it provides for non-sufferers into aspects of the anorexic's thought process. Lila's quest for power and autonomy through self-erasure may appear bafflingly extreme, but it does possess its own logic. --Montreal Gazette

Author Bio

Eisha Marjara: Eisha Marjara has written and directed several award-winning films, including the critically acclaimed NFB docudrama Desperately Seeking Helen, and the satirical The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Faerie is her first novel.