Except The Queen

Flowers blooming, sun shining, trees out in full leaf, time to take a visit to Faerie.  Except the Queen is a book that shows how collaborating authors can really make an excellent story.  Midori Snyder and Jane Yolen take us on a fairy tale ride that crosses the borders of Faerie into our own time and space. My baby sis picked this book out as part of our book club (another good pick sis) and it was also printed in a much sparser short story form in the anthology The Fair Folk.
Two mischievous sisters, Meteora and Serena are banished to the human world as old ladies after letting slip a scandalous secret about the queen.  The sisters are split up to try and live out their old, un-attractive lives the best the can here in the human world.  While living there lives the sisters each encounter a lost soul that is in need of their protection and guidance.  These two "children" (really young adults) troubled as they are. end up being the means to save Faerie.  The book is told from a zillion different view points, with different characters in different voices doing the telling at any given time.   My favorite view point is when the sisters write letters to each other, there is where you get a lot of the background and history and start to piece together the story. The story can get pretty dark at times, but it is interspersed with some great moments of the sisters learning how to cope in this world with very little magic and without even their beauty and youth to rely on.  The sisters each make some very unique friends both magic and mundane, and both learn almost as much as their young charges.  A word of warning, this book is

Fairies

definitely not written in a straight-forward manner, it has a floaty skippy dreamy/nightmarish feel to it.  I personally liked the way it was written, it was beautifully crafted and I thought the different viewpoints and styles added a lot of flavor and contributed to the confusion the two sisters must have been feeling.  In the end everybody gets some sort of happily ever after...even if it wasn't the ever after they thought they wanted.  All in all a very beautiful book, different from a lot of the single view tales.  Some people may have a hard time getting into it, but if you stick with it I found it was well worth it.  I give this book 6 out of 7 double tall skim no whip mocha's.

Did you like the various viewpoints or did it give you a migraine trying to keep them all straight?  How beautiful was the prose and can you believe TWO people collaborated on this?  What would you do if you went from eternal youth and beauty to waking up in a fat 70 year old body?