Review: Fairy Tales

Fairy Tales
Robin

FurPlanet Productions
July 2025

Print Edition $19.95
Ebook Edition $9.95 (DRM-free)

Two broad trends in mainstream fantasy lately have been cozy fantasy, stories firmly set in fantasy worlds with all the expected trappings, but the stakes are deliberately low and the vibe is warm and comforting; and romantasy, which delivers exactly what it says on the tin: a blending of fantasy and romance tropes. While these subgenres aren’t the same—not all cozy fantasy involves romance, and romances aren’t always cozy—there’s a definite overlap in the Venn diagram: they both heavily focus on relationships and characters.

Robin’s debut novel, Fairy Tales, might be furry’s first “cozy romantasy,” and it’s a lesbian romance to boot. That combination helped it make a big splash at Anthrocon last month. The tale brings us a world that’s basically a furry version of our own—but a version where some women are practicing witches.

Tamara the coyote is a wildlife control officer in her mundane life, as well as the relatively new caretaker of her grandmother’s “holding,” a magical demesne, as a witch. As the story opens, she meets Madeline, a stunningly beautiful British tabby cat who’s trespassed onto Tamara’s land in order to take a photograph of herself on a bridge under the full moon. Through a misunderstanding followed by a mishap, Madeline accidentally breaks one of Tamara’s wards, releasing a stream of pixies—creatures Tamara regards as magical pests—into the real world, leaving the coyote with a huge mess to clean up.

Tamara follows standard witchy protocol, giving Madeline a potion to erase her memory of seeing real fairies and meeting a real witch. When Tamara runs into her again in town the next morning at a coffee shop, though, she gets an even bigger shock: Maddie remembers the fairies, and remembers her. And, when one of the escaped pixies makes mischief at the café, Maddie recognizes it for what it is, something a woman who isn’t a witch—and Maddie assuredly is not—shouldn’t be able to do.

Reluctantly, Tamara takes Maddie on as a temporary helper in tracking down the pixies. As they work together, the fairy-obsessed tabby proves to be smarter and more resourceful than she initially appears, and the momentary crush Tamara felt for her when they met only deepens. There’s no sign, though, that Maddie swings that way. Will they end up together by the end of the novel, or remain just friends? Will they catch all the pixies? Will other witches interfere? Why can Maddie see fairies?

Okay: this is a novel with the lowest of stakes—it makes Legends & Lattes, an archetypal recent cozy fantasy, claw-bitingly tense by comparison.Yet if you let yourself be charmed by it all, that simply won’t matter, and it’s damn easy to be charmed. Tamara and Maddie are immensely likeable, strongly drawn characters, as are all the side characters we meet. There’s a lot of thought given to how both witch and fairy magic works, and it makes this world feel surprisingly real and lived-in.

While Fairy Tales has ample room for a sequel—and the last few paragraphs offer a definite suggestion one’s in the works—the novel’s complete as it is. Also worth noting: the delightful interior illustrations throughout by cover artist Slate.