Martin Millar writes like a children’s author, with simple, concise sentences. It would be a nice experiment to give The Good Fairies of New York to kids and see how they react. Do they cry? Hide under a bed and vow never to grow up? It would probably be unethical to try. A group of energetic Scottish fairies (yes, tiny, cute fairies with wings) make their way to New York, where they begin to meddle with people’s lives. There’s an angry slob who watches porn all day, a sad, ill hippie girl, and a homeless lady who thinks she’s Xenophon. Millar jumps from hilarious to sad and back again in mid-paragraph, which is disturbing. Millar’s jokes hurt. He did the same form of farcical melancholia in Lonely Werewolf Girl, which is so similar to The Good Fairies of New York that if you like one you’ll like the other. That one novel is about fairies and the other about werewolves makes less of a difference than you may think. There are perhaps too many similarities, but I can’t really fault Millar for reusing these ideas. Read at least one of them.