Playmates By J.N. Williamson

 

Playmates
By J.N. Williamson
1982 Leisure Books
Paperback, 303 pages

 

                I do not care for J.N. Williamson’s style of writing. He is overly florid, with long meandering sentences filled with commas and similes. No doubt, he is a creative and intelligent writer, but it can come across as pretentious and just “oh, look how clever I am!” Word soup. Then, sometimes he absolutely nails it. For instance, Chapter 7 starts off with this: “It isn’t so much that the person who prefers the imaginary to the real has no use for reality. It’s simply that the imagined has the decency of being shy, and stay out of the way, while that which is real continually and obdurately intrudes.”

 

                I think that line is genius if quite overwritten in itself. (Obdurately means stubbornly. I looked it up.) So yeah, I can give him some credit for his prose but overall, he needs to ease up on the thesaurus and sentence structure.

 

                Connor Quinlan comes back to the Irish countryside where he was born after having moved the USA. He brings his wife and 11-year-old daughter Troy. Connor’s da, Pat, is super glad to have the boy home. Young Troy doesn’t have any friends, so she makes friends in the forest behind the house. They happen to be fairies. Are they real or imaginary? To Troy, they are real. They couldn’t be responsible for the grisly deaths that have been happening in the forest, now could they?

 

                This book throws more Irish at you than a St. Patrick’s Day parade full of green vomit. Pat is forever going on about Irish folklore, the beauty of the Emerald Isle, and how his son is finally back where he belongs. Through him, we learn about just who Troy has befriended in the woods. We get talk about leprechauns, fairies, banshees, little people, family secrets and three pages on a lecture about why books shouldn’t be made into movies. (Sounds like Williamson got refused a few times.) Women aren’t given much of a fair shake in the book, either. They are there for their men. Even Troy, the kid, isn’t treated with much respect.

 

                In truth though, I enjoyed parts of this book a lot, even though I don’t give two shits anymore about Ireland’s history. As the story developed, I got keen on finding where it would go. It’s not a keeper but I admit to turning the pages rather quickly. It certainly is different and for that, I have to give it some extra points.