Flossed & Found: A faery's tale and letters

by Pepper MacDonald

Pepper leads a busy life with all the freedom a Gen X kid could want. She lives with her distracted father on an old hippy commune transitioning to a biker maintenance and repair garage in North Georgia. Getting around on her lovingly maintained two-wheeler, she juggles commune chores, food scavenging, and two paying jobs. Her best friend is her dog, Sergeant. When her first permanent tooth pushes through, she comes into some easy money. By capturing her tooth retrieval faery, she secures a knowledgeable mentor who will teach her how to eat in the wild and honor her own true North.


Iris is a young woman coming of age in wartime England. She shares her frustration about limited career opportunities and dreary fashion choices with her faery friend, who enjoys visiting the brook behind her parents’ home. When Iris makes some photographs of herself with Maeve, she launches a controversy in the human realm, putting Maeve’s reputation and her people’s way-of-life in peril. The unintended betrayal strains their friendship to the limit.


Matthew’s mother excessively dotes on him, worrying incessantly that he is not eating enough, despite clear evidence to the contrary. His weight isolates him from his peers and traps him in a struggle against his only loved-one. Maeve helps him tune in to his emerging inner voice and stand up for himself. Unwittingly, he is drawn into faery politics and Maeve’s complicated network of benevolent manipulation, reaping both benefits and heartache.


Macie has all the cards stacked against her. Raised in a remote area, by parents who did not have much use for education, Macie goes off the rails early. When she finds out she is expecting a baby in high school she moves in with her boyfriend, only to find that he is wandering the destructive path already followed by his father. After one beating too many, Macie begins a relationship with a man she believes to be different, only to find out that he is just another dud. As Macie’s life falls apart, Maeve does what she can to salvage the only good thing from the tattered ribbons.


Through narrative and letters, Pillow Talk tracks tooth retrieval agent Maeve Faedent as she meddles with her clients’ lives, using the relationships to undermine the secrecy protocols in her own world and rescue a few humans along the way.

Audible Audio

Published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Jennifer Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lively romp, both big and small, with indelible characters scattered across this world and Maeve's. This is the kind of earnest faery a kid dreams of after placing their tooth under their pillow. Read this novel and it will surely conjure up childhood summer adventures and possibly give a little hope to cynical adults that someone or some creature out there has your back.

[Tara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll be honest – as a contributing writer of this book, I am slightly biased! However, I wanted to write a review anyway because it really does deserve a look. Pillow Talk is an atypical book – part fantasy, part autobiography, part history. While it is most definitely a work of fiction, some of the most surprising and unusual events in the story are based on facts. Books have been written about tooth fairies before, but the story of Maeve Faedent, the tooth retrieval faery, and her loyal human friends is not just a light and fluffy piece of fun but an inspiring tale of life, replete with all of life’s usual challenges. Women take charge of their lives and a boy becomes much more than his upbringing suggested he could be. While Maeve is the central, unifying force of the novel, the other characters are strong and important in their own right. In short, Pillow Talk is a fun, unusual and uplifting read. (Make sure your teeth are sparkly clean before you begin!)

[Sunny Chapow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Light-hearted book about a girl who befriends her tooth-fairy and gets spun into a web of faery and human politics.