If you recognize the name Tam Lin at the beginning of Kimberly Bea’s novel, The Changeling Queen, you already know how the story is going to end. Bea strings us along by telling the old Scottish story from the perspective of the Fairy Queen, who is sympathetic enough that I wondered if the story would end differently this time.
Bess knew she was a changeling from the time she was young. She just didn’t know who her real mother was until her adopted mother dies and Bess has the opportunity to finally ask questions about where she came from. As she investigates, Bess tries to make a place for herself in her mother’s village as a healer. Her adopted father and the local priest hate Bess’s defiance and strangeness, so this is harder than it should be. The only person who accepts Bess for herself is another outcast, Thomas Shepherd, the illegitimate son of the local baron.
We learn about Bess’s life in flashbacks, as she tells her story to the canonically stubborn Janet and Tam Lin. The first half of Bess’s story is the most affecting. The betrayals she faces absolutely tugged at my heart strings. The second half, which reveals Bess claiming her throne in fairy, has an amazing setting but feels thin and rushed in comparison to the rich first half. We have to learn about the Teind, the reason the Queen of Fairies wants Tam Lin in the first place, through context clues. We never see Queen Bess’s relationship with Tam Lin at all.
As I finished The Changeling Queen, I ran into the same problems I had with Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. First, Bea did such a good job with Bess (as Maguire did with Elphaba) that completely forgot that the Fairy Queen was the villain of the larger story. This problem led to my second problem: that Bea had to pull a hard right turn at the end of the book to stay true to the original tale. Bess is such a sympathetic character that I wanted her to be the hero for a change. If she had been pursuing anyone other than Tam Lin, Bess could’ve been. She would’ve been able to keep doing her part to pay the terrible price of the Teind and keep Fairy alive for another seven years. But because her quarry is Tam Lin himself and the woman waiting for Tam Lin is Janet, there’s no other way the story could end. We never get Tam Lin or Janet’s side of the story, so I never got a chance to develop even a smidgen of sympathy for them. If Bea had given us the perspectives of both the Queen of the Fairies and Janet, she would’ve created some delicious tension.
I hate to fault a book for not being what I wanted, but that’s where I find myself at the end of The Changeling Queen. I think I can only recommend it to people who don’t know the story of Tam Lin. That said, I’m not sure if The Changeling Queen would make sense without knowing about Tam Lin and Janet.