An ambitious volume that seeks to trace the history of fairies in folklore and popular culture from the ancient world to the turn of the Millennium, which of course is the subject of libraries of books. While Purkiss by necessity treats portions of her subject briefly—with increasing brevity as the centuries roll onward—she does so with clarity and manages to pack a great amount of analysis into a relatively small space. There are ideas here that I hadn’t considered in my years of interest in fairies, and these new perspectives made this book highly enjoyable for me. I do find the exclusion of Brian Froud and Labyrinth from the final chapter suspect, but their inclusion would have thrown a wrench into the author’s assertion that fairies are dead in pop culture (an assertion that is impossible to make 19 years after this book’s publication, much to my joy).