Four friends, Blue, Elisa, Jason and Gabe, travel to Cape Breton Island, and specifically the beautiful Starling Cove, to sell Blue’s grandmother’s house (she having recently fallen off mortality’s perch). Blue wants to use the money to pay off the debt he owes on his New York restaurant. However, returning to Starling Cove dredges up old memories for Blue, especially that time when he was five years old and vanished into the woods. He returned two weeks later, but with the stigma attached that he might actually be a Changeling, what with the Fae, or the Other Kind, being long time residents of the forests of Starling Cove.  Blue, with his magical effect on those around him and his astonishing cooking skills does, in fact, turn out to be a replica of the real Michael Whitley (Blue’s actual name). As you can expect, this revelation is a bit of a game changer.

Not sure if you can tell but I’m a tad cynical about this novel. Not because I think the plot is silly – there’s plenty of mileage that can found in a story where our protagonist discovers he/she is not actually human – but because The Glittering World relies heavily on you being invested in Blue and his friends. And from early on I found Blue and Gabe and Jason and Elisa, with their secrets and their neuroses and their angst to be precisely the sort of people I’d unfriend on Facebook if they had an account. There are some flashes of good writing and strong imagery when Levy describes the alien nature of the “Other Kind” but ultimately I simply didn’t give a shit about what happens to Blue, or Jason’s frustration with his wife Elisa, or Elisa’s secret pregnancy and then abduction by the Other Kind (which involves her part Fae baby being ripped from her) or Gabe’s ethereal, quixotic nature. And I think I was meant too.  Ultimately I found reading Robert Levy’s début novel to be a real slog.

Mind you the cover is pretty.

If you’re looking for a second opinion, Philip K. Jason describes The Glittering World as “gorgeously frightening, astonishingly creative, and ready to be a cult classic.”  Unsurprisingly, my support is with Bird-Aine Parnell who, like me, didn’t find the character’s particularly likeable.