Granted by John David Anderson

Ophelia is a fairy whose job it is to be a granter.  She is new at the job and anticipates her first assignment to grant a wish.  When the assignment comes, she soon discovers that covert operations in the Human World are not as straight forward as she had expected from her training at the academy.  Within hours she has damaged her wing and lost most of her equipment.  With the help of a friendly dog she continues her quest  to find the coin used to make the wish and use her fairy magic to grant it.

This was one of the most annoying and frustrating books I have ever read. Oh my!  The 20th time Ophelia's efforts were foiled, yet again, I rolled my eyes and almost slipped the CD out of the player.  I found myself dreading turning it on again. The only thing that kept me going was that I began to wonder what made the book SO bad.  Some people seemed to like it.  It got a starred review in Kirkus. After some analysis, I decided that the thing that bothered me the most was the pacing.  The story went on and on, (and on and on).  And just when you thought something was actually going to happen, the writer broke in with an aside about fairy practices and culture. Arg! It reminds me of an adult that dangles something in front of a child and keeps snatching it away right before the child grabs it.  The adult keeps up the game, thinking it is funny until the child starts to cry.  That's what it felt like. Another thing that slowed down the book was that the author was obviously in love with the fantasy world he can created.  He mentions the same fairy practices multiple times throughout the story, just in case the reader had forgotten that "fairies heal fast" or "it is super important that fairies leave no trace" or "the coin kept saying the words of the wish."  It would also be interesting to do a word count of how many times the phrase "I wish" appears in the book.  I am betting it would be over 1000.  Where was the editor? The book has 325 pages.  If the editor had forced the writer to cut it in half, maybe 160 pages, it could have been a really cute and entertaining book. As it is, it was a truly painful read. (2018)