The Summer Gardener by Jan Irving
If you think that fairies (and yes, I’m talking about the real thing, the little fae people with colourful wings) are charming and pretty, you haven’t yet met Fane; fine is little, barely nine inches tall, but he doesn’t like to be called pretty, and for sure he uses his charm only on who he likes, and he doesn’t like many people. He is the guardian of a garden, and he allows inside it only gardener he likes, and lucky Alejo, Fane likes him.
Alejo is a big but gentle man, young and innocent, yes, innocent as virgin; from a very traditional Spanish family, he is not the man of it, meaning that he has to provide for his mother and little brother; he does it working a construction job on winter and as gardener on summer, even if being a gardener was his true dream. Now he has no money to continue his landscaping studies, and he nurtures his love for plants nurturing the garden. Fane understands that Alejo is better than the other humans, nearer to nature, and so he almost forces the big man to become his friend, and something more.
It’s really funny to see how a little thing like Fane can be bossy and domineering of bigger Alejo, and he can probably do that since Alejo is not really an imposing man; sometime I had even the impression that Alejo is too much mite and quite, but it was in his character and probably the only way for Fane to convince him, a straight boy, that in the Fae world there is no gender, no distinction between men and women, and you love who you like and not who you have to.
It’s a strange contemporary world the one in which this story is set; a world where there is Starbucks and Barbie (otherwise where Fane would have found his late ’70 furniture), but where fairies are pretty common, and live among people, in the garden, and no one seems to find it strange. It was so normal that after a bit, even the reader found it ordinary, and the love story between the nine inches fairy and the big gardener was right, even if not ordinary.
I really like as the author let the reader understood of Fane different nature, the little details that gave you the idea that Fane was indeed little, but that were so natural that didn’t feel strange. Even if Fane is a otherworldly creature, in this little story he was only another man in love, a man who can feel loneliness and also pain, normally an immortal creature, but if you wound him, he bleeds like everyone else. Basically the story is light, but there is a subdued bittersweet undertone that mixes well with the plot.
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Amazon Kindle: The Summer Gardener
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Cover Art by Dan Skinner