"Following the death of her beloved stepfather, Zara is forced to leave Charleston and her mother to live with her grandmother in Maine. The move is bad enough but when Zara realises she has been followed...by a strange man, things get even worse."

Given the popularity of Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series, supernatural-boy-meets-ordinary-girl love stories are enjoying a bit of a boom period. It's also exciting that the known quantity of conventions (vampires & werewolves) are open to reimagining and so, naturally, many writers and publishers are keen to chase that type of success. Disappointingly for Need, the effort is half-hearted at best and more often than not an oversimplification on that theme. Books about love but not classified as romances for teens are a tricky business: there must be a whiff of underdog or loneliness about the protagonist, often a sudden change of environment, there should be unexpected male attention which the established popular females resent, and above all there must be opportunities for the relationship to blossom and grow, often with a dash of danger or risk involved.

Need has all of these but the issue is the convention against which Carrie Jones has tried to overlay this formula: fairies. While it's a noble attempt to recast an underexplored fantasy character – and noting that it contains some well-written descriptive outdoor scenes - the leaps that the reader must continuously make in order to follow the narrative are frequently stilted or unconvincing. The explanations offered of key characters and plot points are over-reliant upon "oh, didn't you know that…?" type of assertions about the fairy genre and the expectations upon the reader are a bit too far fetched at times even for the fans of fantasy. F

Finally, the narrative itself spikes between mourning and exhilaration - classic teenage moods swings, true, but it makes for uneven reading. Overall a book probably best-suited to a reluctant or developing reader put off by Twilight's length.

2010-02-03