Blurb:

He's Robin Goodfellow to those he knows. Or Puck, his psychotic alter-ego, to those he kills. Betrayed, banished and bitter, this fae warrior lives among human beings, they think he’s a demon. The teenagers he’s vowed to protect, despise him. But now the fae need his help, especially the man who betrayed him. He’s brought along Robin’s lover to guarantee his cooperation.

Yet things are not as they seem. For shadowy forces within the fae have different plans. It’s not Robin they want. They need Puck. He's the perfect stooge to kill a king.

Review:

A while back (two or three weeks ago), I decided that I wanted to collect and read all of my fellow reviewers' books. And so, lo and behold, I spent a bit of money buying some of their books and others. Just a few. Not really a few. Among that haul was this one here, “The Bastard from Fairyland”, by Phil Parker, and I didn’t do any research into this novel whatsoever before I started reading it, so that I could be surprised by something new. Let's just say that it left me wanting to read the rest of the series.

Why do I say this? Well, for that, I need to delve into the parts that stood out to me. To hook you into reading this review I came up with a sentence or two (“Robin has had enough of the Fae, but they haven’t had enough of him. Yet. They just need him to kill someone. Is that all though? Click here for more info!”). But, as always with those short description tags, it only describes a bit of the book, not the whole thing.

Let me start first with the main characters of “The Bastard from Fairyland”. One is already mentioned, Robin Goodfellow, aka Puck. The other two are not mentioned, but play just as much of a role as Robin, if not more.  But that is for you to decide once you open up this book, since I’ll only be talking about Robin here since he’s in the blurb. 

The fae Robin Goodfellow, or Puck is the original Jekyll and Hyde, if you will. A cheerful person who acts goodnaturedly around others, with just a bit of violence if he’s Robin Goodfellow. Absolute machine of death if he’s Puck. Adding onto that, he’s been around humans long enough due to his self-banishment that other Fae see him as the odd one. Furthermore, he’s a loner who doesn’t like interacting with the world, but is forced to due to the dark court.

This brings me to the plot of “The Bastard from Fairyland”. At first, I just thought it would be Robin Goodfellow going on a murderspree against other Fae as they try to take over the human realm, with the start of it being in England. That was until the first, and second PoV shift to the other characters within this book. From then on, it became a story of political intrigue and general skullduggery. Even then, I was not expecting this plot to go the way it did, with whatever expectations I had up until the third character PoV got tossed into a portal to the Sahara desert. With this plot going from a hack and slash to political intrigue, there were a few subplots going on. Like the genetics one. I’m tossing that in there fully knowing that that sounds off the rails until you’ve read the book and have gotten to that point. Overall however, there were no plot holes that I noticed and the ending of the book is great from a series standpoint. You can either stop there and use your imagination as to what happens next to Robin Goodfellow, or you can continue on reading the series, watching the rest of the shenanigans unfold throughout the other two books.

Another thing that was interesting to me was the way magic got used in this tale. You’d expect “The Bastard from Fairyland” to be brimming with spells and magic. In truth, it’s just mentioned on the fly, or only attributed to a specific character. In Robin's own words, it’s more advanced technology than anything else, with humans being the ones to scream magic seeing that technology used. But overall, that works. This book is less about magic being used and more about having enough wit to somehow survive the tumultuous political landscape of the Fae courts without dying mysteriously.

Aside from the paperback formatting (where page numbers?), and the jarring three first person PoV’s, which were thankfully highlighted in large letters and different dividers, nothing within this book felt out of place.

Overall, if you like light fantasy with a bit of romance, some dragons and highly intriguing plotlines, I’d hand you this book, and wish you happy reading.

As always, thank you for reading to the end of this review, and I hope I’ve helped nudge you towards your next read. If this doesn’t seem like your cup of tea, don’t fret. We here have a ton of reviews of other books with other genres for you to peruse, like Dave Lawson's review of “Dark Town”, written by Palmer Pickering or E.L. Lyons review of “Daros”, written by Dave Dobson. 

Wherever you are reading this, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening or good night!