The novel, 30 Days Without Wings, a fantasy novel aimed at YA readers, tells the story of Elise, a fairy who trades in her wings for legs and her tiny size for human height. Elise is at the age where she must declare what she will do for the rest of her life in front of a fairy council. She makes an unusual request and asks for a manifest, a leave of absence for 30 days, to live with another colony. In her case, the other colony is a human neighborhood. Elise thinks she’ll be more comfortable in the world of homo sapiens than fairies. Don’t try to guess why she wants to leave the fairy world. I guarantee it’s darker than what you think.

The council grants her leave, and with the reluctant help of a friend, Elise’s legs elongate and she proceeds to stomp through the forest, adjusting to her legs as well as her loss of her wings. Her travails as a human at first made me laugh, and the initial scenes are creative. Elise finds a job and a place to live rather quickly and with a touch of help, is enrolled in high school at her self-proclaimed age of sixteen. Elise has thirty days to decide whether to stay with the humans or return to the fairies.

I thought I had this story figured out after reading the early chapters. The novel unfurled as I expected as she turned human. I enjoyed the pixie’s observations of being so tall. After she finds a job and enters high school, I predicted what would happen next, but suddenly the novel took an unexpected turn and then another. I expected one character to follow a stereotypical arc you’d find in stories between an awkward fantastical creature and a ruggedly handsome boy but the novel took him in a different direction. The climax was both logical and satisfactory. I was surprised how innocent it started and how complex it ended. In this way, it exceeded my expectations. I anticipated the angst, the longing, but not the realistic portrayal of how a story like this would naturally play out.

This novel has surprising depth for its length. The author, Tabatha Shipley, packs a lot into her plot and characters without a lot of detail and wrings a great deal of emotion out of her readers.