It’s been a long time since last I read a fairy tale. “A Face Like Glass” by Frances Hardinge is a really beautiful one.

The book starts in the caverns of a cheesemaster, a specialist who creates cheeses. As I love good food and am especially fond of nice cheeses, that started off very promising. And the promise was fulfilled. The book is fantastic from first till last page.

The book is full of people creating delicacies – be them desserts, wines or what not. At one point I even thought “You could get fat by reading about all this food stuff”. The author has some really amazing ideas about what food could be possible. As this is a fairy tale, most of the creations are simply impossible, but who cares. They are really compelling fantasies.

By now you probably got the idea that the book I’m talking about here is some kind of food lovers book, but that’s not the case. That’s only one aspect.

There are dark secrets and intrigues. The world described here is some kind of medieval society that for some reasons lives below earth in a complex of caverns called Caverna.

It’s a firework of fantastic inventiveness. You meet guys to whom none talks longer than five minutes, because talking longer to them would drive anyone insane. There’s one person who never sleeps totally. There’s always either his right or his left brain awake because he fears betrayal and murder. Both brain hemispheres have different personalities and scheme against each other. And all people have to learn face expressions, because they don’t have any natural ones and cannot show their emotions on their faces.

It’s all crazy, it’s all fantastic and you have to read it, if you ever loved to read fairy tales.