Like Neil Gaiman says in his introduction to this book, I owned it for several years before reading Martin Millar's The Good Fairies of New York -- and, I must confess, my reasons for the delay are not as interesting or as excusable as Neil's. The best I can say is, it got lost in the shuffle and ended up on a shelf with books I had already read. When I realized the error, years had passed, and the book found itself on another shelf with books I fully intended to get to very soon ... and we all know how that works. Books can accumulate far beyond a reader's ability to consume them.

But it caught my eye as I was preparing for a vacation to Florida this summer, and on a whim I took it along. I'm so glad I did. Good Fairies is a fun, light read, light-hearted in tone but with some serious undertones at work as well.

The story revolves around a farcical series of events involving a pair of bickering Scottish thistle fairies named Morag and Heather, both of whom are talented fiddlers and unrepentant pranksters and meddlers, who have found themselves in New York City after a ... series of misunderstandings back home.

The two fairies are overwhelmed by the size, noise and culture of the Big Apple, where they interact with similarly displaced Irish fairies, mercenary Cornish fairies, local Italian, Chinese and Ghanaian fairies, a mad homeless woman who relives ancient battles, a lovely young woman named Kerry who's battling the effects of Crohn's disease, a perfectly dreadful fiddler named Dinnie with a bad attitude to match, and assorted other characters, all intersecting in a tapestry of misadventures and operating more often than not at cross purposes.

There's plenty of music and mischief, whimsy, romance and alcohol, war, Shakespeare, flowers, sex and swordplay, oppression, rock 'n' roll, revenge, pornography and dieting to go around, plus an ending that leaves a good bit to the reader's imagination. While some readers might wish for a more defined resolution for some of the characters, the ambiguous conclusion feels somehow right for the likes of Morag and Heather.