Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist

For Book Review Wednesday, I'm digging deep folks. This one has a copyright of 1988, the year I graduated high school! Yes, I was twelve--wink, wink. If you have a teenager/twenty-something who is done with Harry Potter and the Twilight Series, this would be a good choice.

Faerie Tale starts with a tried and true premise: couple moves into spooky old house deep in the woods of upstate New York. Their blended family includes twin boys and the dad's teenage daughter, Gabrielle, from an earlier marriage. Legends swirl around their new home; it has a dark history of buried treasure, missing children, and strange encounters in the woods with mythical creatures.

The twins love exploring the Faerie Woods, except for the spooky bridge, where something evil lurks. Gabrielle loves two things: horses and her new boyfriend Jack. Alone in the woods, she meets Wayland Smith, a Paul Bunyon type blacksmith, who replaces her horse's broken shoe. In the stables, she is assaulted by Puck, the creature from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Two researchers into Faerie and Celtic legends witness a faerie "hunt".

All these bizarre happenings lead up to the kidnapping of one of the twins by a Faerie creature known as the Fool, who replaces the child with deranged doppelgänger. While the parents whisk the changeling off to the hospital, his twin sets off on a quest to find his real brother.

Does this scream YA to you? I think yes. But even if you're outside that demographic, fans of fantasy, suspense, and horror will enjoy this fast moving tale backed up by tantalizing tidbits of actual German and Celtic mythology.