Daddy Issues
By Jes Young
Have you ever noticed that the parents in fairy tales are either negligent, wicked, or dead? There are a few exceptions, but by and large this is a group of people who Child Services really should have been keeping an eye on. I mean, Belle’s father’s life of bad business decisions and petty theft is the cause of her imprisonment. The phrase “wicked stepmother” was coined to describe Snow White’s uber-competitive new mommy. Don’t get me started on a list of dead fairy tale parents—that thing could take days to assemble. The point is, parents aren’t always shown in the best light in your average fairy tale. I don’t want to point any fingers, but I think maybe Mother and Father Grimm were monsters. As an aside, my parents are great. In all my 37 years, they’ve never abandoned me in the woods. Not even once.
Anyway, this long standing tradition of fairy tale princesses with parental issues is one I continue in my urban fantasy romance series, the Princess of Twilight & Dawn. In the first book, Tab Bennett and the Inbetween, we learn about Tab’s relationship with her mother which manages to be incredibly complicated even though her mother is dead and they’ve never met. In Underneath, Tab, who’s been raised in away from any contact with the Elvish world, takes a dangerous journey to finally meet her father, Daniel, the dark king of the Underneath. Once she's there, Tab is forced to confront the seductive nature of Darkness and her own potential to truly become her father’s daughter.
