**give away that caught my eye

4.5 Stars!

This book makes me happy XD

Why does this book make all my feels jump around like a kitten with a new toy? Well I will tell you.

1. She hunts fairies, and they dressed like hipsters( I have a little thing agents the way hipsters dress, no hate, just a thing). I was never one to like fairies very much, more so because my Nan, god love her, told me horror stories about them when I was a child. About how if you wandered into the woods at night they would take you away and drive you mad, crazy, cookoo, and all sorts of stupid. Only for my mother, evil woman that I love so much ;P, to play alone with such horrors. Needless to say for me to find a book that has a Fairy Slayer, brightened my day.

2. (She totally Hates the hot guy, even if she does get him at the end, still)

3. The banter was fun, quick and at times made me laugh out loud, I do enjoy a good laugh.

There were some little downers, and the book did have me going, what the flying F X| a few times.

But I will overlook those minor little annoyances and just enjoy the fact that even though she doesn't actually kill any fairies, just the big super one at the end, she doesn't get what she wants,Dragon Slayer and the story doesn’t have that typical happy ending, it all manages to get tied together neatly and leaves you with that little bit of a hint that maybe,Just Maybe, sometime in the future, there will be more.

Have fun with this read

Keep your mind open and your thoughts crazy!

Don't Stop Dancing

Emily


( )

Fairy Bad Day by Amanda Ashby follows Emma Jones, a second generation student of Burtonwood Academy, as she tries to come to terms with not being assigned the same type of magical creature as her recently deceased mother. Instead of dragons, as she has been training for all her life, she's been assigned fairies: small, annoying, but hardly dangerous, creatures.

Fairies like to hang out at the mall, wear the current fashion and eat Skittles. They also like to insult their attackers and make a nuisance of themselves. To Emma's eternal frustration, they are also damn near impossible to kill! How can she prove herself worth of dragon slaying if she can't even handle one pesky fairy?

There is something bigger at stake. It's tied to the history of the academy and the fighting of magical creatures. The book suffers a bit from a pacing problem, in that it takes longer than it should to introduce the main plot. The first third of the book is given to Emma's life in school and the mall rat habits of the fairies. ( )

I went ahead and purchased Amanda Ashby’s Fairy Bad Day since I was looking for a fun, light read. And this turned out to be just right!

Fairy Bad Day features “sighted” teenagers who attend Burtonwood Academy to learn all about “elementals” (such as dragons, demons, ogres, and fairies) that only they can see and how to slay them. Fifteen-year-old Emma is the daughter of one of the greatest dragon-slayers ever and is all set to be inducted as the next one in the family, only to learn she has been assigned to be a fairy-slayer! To add insult to injury, her coveted spot has been given to Curtis Green, a scholarship student who was a late addition to the academy. Since fairies are actually considered to be more of a nuisance than a threat, Emma doesn’t really have an instruction manual to fall back on and has to find out the best ways to slay them by herself. Nail files, hairspray and Skittles become her tools of choice, but it turns out the little 10-inch fashionistas are a lot tougher to slay than expected! When Emma and Curtis are teamed up for a class assignment, they stumble upon a giant killer fairy with an evil plot to overturn the mortal realm. As they work together to discover the fairy’s plan, they get to know each other better and Emma is reluctantly drawn to Curtis. But Curtis has a secret of his own that could end his slaying career forever.

I really enjoyed all the characters in this story, from Emma and Curtis to Emma’s friends Loni and Tyler – and especially Emma’s fairy nemeses, Gilbert, Rupert and Trevor. Emma is a bright, confident girl who is convinced she was meant to slay dragons. But when she comes up against the giant evil fairy, she realizes there may actually be something out there tougher than dragons and worthy of her skills. I liked the growth of Emma’s character, and that she didn’t fall easily for Curtis. First she gains respect for him and then the attraction follows naturally. Her interactions with her father and stepmother were very revealing, and it was nice to see how her attitudes towards them changed. Using her brains and skills, Emma goes from a resentful teen to one who knows who she wants to be as she grows.

Curtis is one of the gentler leading men I’ve come across, but he can be tough when he has to be. The small snippets he provided of his life prior to Burtonwood showed he was coming from a difficult background and added more dimension to his character. I wasn’t too sure why he was holding back from a romance with Emma, but when he actually talked it out with her I could see exactly where he was coming from and what a stand-up young man he was. Intelligent, brave, respectful, caring – everything you could want in a boyfriend. His secret wasn’t too difficult to figure out, but I was surprised how it tied into his and Emma’s skill assessments.

The secondary characters of Loni, Tyler and the fairies were just right. Loni was a wonderful mash-up of tech skills and horoscopes. EVERYTHING for her is based on her and her friends’ horoscopes, which was really cute. Tyler is the gambler of the bunch, always up for a bet and the obvious campus bookie. His fortunes are assured. The fairies have attitudes much bigger than their inches and are laugh-out-loud funny, from their fashion sense to their love of James Bond movies. I thoroughly enjoyed all of their scenes. The giant killer fairy is actually a fairly decent menace; there is no known way of killing this particular elemental and it is going to take everything Emma and her friends have learned to try to stop it. Her ultimate solution to the problem was very resourceful.

I don’t really have any negatives for this book; the most I can say is there were a few editing errors, with a couple of words missing. I was looking for a light, entertaining read and this book delivered.

Amanda Ashby’s Fairy Bad Day is a fast, funny, light-hearted read. The main character of Emma shows some really nice growth throughout the story, and she is balanced by a well-rounded leading man in Curtis. The secondary characters are developed just enough to make them stand-out as individuals, with strong quirks to make them interesting. With danger and action, humor, and a little romance, Fairy Bad Day is a very good read indeed.

(Edit 4/20/13: I recently updated my rating to 4 stars from 3.5, simply because I've read it a couple of times since my first review and the story stands up well. An entertaining, satisfying, fun read with wonderful characters and plenty of humor.) ( )

From August 2011 SLJ:
Gr 7-10–Burtonwood Academy is a training ground for sight-gifted students to hone their skills as protectors in a sight-blind world. Now that Emma Jones is a sophomore, she is about to receive her designation, and she is sure that she will follow in her late mother’s footsteps as a dragon slayer. So when Principal Kessler tells her that she has been chosen to slay fairies, she is mortified: Why rid the world of 10-inch beings whose worst offense seems to be switching food labels in grocery stores? The students assigned to the more ferocious elementals–ogres, goblins, harpies–find her assignment hilarious, and her humiliation intensifies when the wisecracking fairies who frequent the mall prove to be tougher to slay than she had anticipated. To top things off, Curtis Green is the new dragon designee. Sure he’s cute, but doesn’t he know that that was supposed to be her assignment? The two are thrown together when she spots what looks like a vicious dragon on Burtonwood’s campus. Turns out that it’s not a dragon, but a particularly nasty (and tall) breed of fairy. Emma and Curtis must resolve their differences long enough to get rid of the Darkhel before he opens the magical gate that lets in all the other evil forces. And if, in the process, a little romance sneaks in, what’s the harm? The characters are nicely developed, the dialogue is fresh and engaging, the author’s irreverent take on good versus evil will hook readers, and the satisfying plot twists will keep them involved till the end. A lighthearted story with plenty of substance.–Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA ( )