Regular marked price: $16.95Discount Price: $15.25
Cost Savings: $1.70 (10%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780312868338
ISBN number: 0312868332
Label: Tor Books
Manufacturer: Tor Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: December 15, 1998
Publishing house: Tor Books
Sale Popularity Level: 272980
Studio: Tor Books
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Sam and his friends are like any normal gang of normal young boys. Roaming wild around the outskirts of their car-factory town. Daring adults to challenge their freedom.
Until the day Sam wakes to find the Tooth Fairy sitting on the edge of his bed. Not the benign figure of childhood myth, but an enigmatic presence that both torments and seduces him, changing his life forever.
Amazon.com Review:
The disquietude in Graham Joyce's coming-of-age tale is that of having too much power as a child--the kind of power that turns your slightest wishes into mayhem. This power is granted to the rather ordinary and fearful member (neither the smartest nor the strongest) of a trio of friends growing up in small-town England by his stinky and enigmatic night visitor, the Tooth Fairy. The charm of this British Fantasy Award-winning novel is in his subtle and unsentimental portrait of a supernaturally benighted childhood. As Ellen Datlow writes in Omni, 'Joyce immediately hooks his readers from the very very first page with a small sharp shock and holds the reader with engaging characters and an air of menace. This tooth fairy is ... mischievous and destructive, representing our own worst aspects.' --Fiona Webster
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
I read this book at least twice and I still find it interesting each time I pick it up. I think it scary and humorous and shocking all at the same time. I love it.
Rated by buyers -
"The Tooth Fairy" by Graham Joyce, © 1996
Sometimes it is really hard to understand what you are reading. In this story it is because you are presented a bunch of boys at an early age, 6 or 7, and how they grow up. You do not know quite who is the main character because the boys are such good friends and the story does not differentiate between them until after the Tooth Fairy appears. Poor old Sam gets his money from the Tooth Fairy, but they end up fighting and helping each other throughout the story. It does have a happy ending, sort of odd and you have to realize that Sam is helping the Tooth Fairy, but it is so odd how he helps you have to wonder at if it really worked.
Clive is gifted in school, whatever that means. Terry is maimed, but steadfast throughout. The boys get into trouble and have fun all over the place. They meet a girl who becomes one of the gang. She is able to keep them all at arms length, so no one of them feels like the others are any more special. Kind of a bit of a stretch for little 12 year olds.
Rated by buyers -
A terrific, whimsical, sensitive and sensual look at growing up. In Sam Joyce created a stand-in for every thoughtful boy. In Alice and Linda he made icons of the unattainable. And in the creature herself...well, as others have said, as the book progresses what she is becomes less important than the effect of her existence on Sam's world.
Carnal when it needs to be, sweetly trepidatious the rest of the time--this book speaks volumes about expectations, relationships, and what is lost as we arrow through time.
Actually reminds me a lot of The Perks of Being a Wallflower--although it's definitely more whimsical and sensual. Funny to use those words in the same sentence to describe any novel.
Definitely recommended.
Rated by buyers 
-
Graham Joyce, The Tooth Fairy (Tor, 1998)
I had a rough time getting into The Tooth Fairy, for reasons I don't quite understand. It's really the kind of book that should have grabbed me from the opening lines and not let go, but I spent almost two months wandering aimlessly through it before it got interesting. (I did manage to pinpoint the moment when it did get interesting, though--when the tooth fairy's character gains some real depth, which happens on page 166 of the first-edition American hardback. Yes, I'm that obsessive.)
For all that, though, it's certainly not a bad little book, chronicling the trials and tribulations of the infamous Redstone Moodies, aka the Heads-Looked-At Boys, aka any number of epithets hurled at them by elders, peers, passing strangers, and anyone else who gets near them. Sam, Terry, and Clive are the town misfits, growing up together almost by default, as no one else will have them. They're pretty much guaranteed to be bad seeds, and they fulfill all expectations, though none of them is quite sure why they're doing so. Intelligence and crushing boredom do not mix well. We see glimpses of their lives from their very young days (the boys are still prepubescent as the book opens) to the summer before college.
Sam, however, is slightly different than the others: on the night he lost his very first tooth, as the tooth fairy came to collect it, he woke up, and the two of them became inextricably bound. No one else around him, of course, can see the tooth fairy; this is a burden he must shoulder on his own. And a burden it is, given that the tooth fairy is a particularly nasty individual at times, cursing those around Sam in inventive, and rather ugly, ways. Sam quickly comes to recognize the power this holds, and the dark consequences of abusing that power.
Definitely not your normal coming-of-age tale, and it's certainly nice to see one that's not immediately sent off to the young adult market just because it's a coming-of-age tale. Certainly worth checking out. ***
Rated by buyers -
After reading the "good" reviews for this book, I waited with high anticipation to read it for myself. However, I was really disappointed with the entire outcome. This book would have been better off as a short story, say 1/3 the pages. The entire middle section is bland, boring, and drawn out. It isn't until the last several chapters where it really starts to pick up. The ending did bring back feeling of my own childhood, but other than that, I felt I was kept waiting and waiting for something to REALLY happen, anything to happen. I guess I'm also not used to an english writer. I'm much more used to writing styles of Orson Scott Card, and his Ender's series. If there were half stars, I would really make this book a 2 and 1/2 star review and not even three.
Find other books like this one:
