Despite this, I did like the easy friendship Lucy and Zack shared and how their growing feelings for each other both surprised them and made them stronger. I've loved similar storylines, but if I can't get into the desperate humans and really root for them, it's hard to stay involved. They center on truly cruel supernatural beings playing wanton games with desperate, usually outnumbered humans. Part of this removed feeling comes, I think, from the nature of the tales themselves. I enjoyed them but felt that the characters remained somehow aloof from the reader to a certain degree, with the result that the stories as a whole felt cold.
It had that same eerie, lyrical feel to it and I had similar responses to both books. Impossible reminded me of an end of high school version of Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. She is accompanied on this endeavor by her childhood friend Zack and her adoptive parents Leo and Soledad. Soon Lucy is rushing to beat the devil and save herself from insanity and her unborn daughter from sharing her unbearable fate. Lucy manages to lead an eminently normal life interspersed with occasional random visits from Miranda, who is never really lucid beyond mumbling strange lyrics to "Scarborough Fair." But when prom night turns disastrous for Lucy it sets into motion an unbelievable chain of events and they all lead back to Miranda and an awful curse the Scarborough women have suffered under for centuries. Lucy Scarborough has spent her life with her adoptive parents because her mother, Miranda, is insane. In a few words it is a contemporary suspenseful folk fantasy with some hereditary insanity, a sweet romance, and one extremely dubious (and dangerous) elven knight. It's all good, of course, because I've always loved the Simon & Garfunkel version, as well as Dylan's quasi-adaptation of the ballad "Girl from the North Country." And it's good because Nancy Werlin does such interesting things developing a novel based on the lyrics. It has been, you'll forgive the pun, impossible. Since reading this book I have not been able to get that song out of my head.
"Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme."
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