The Cottingley Fairies is a story-like narration of the events of 1918, in which two young girls created fake pictures of fairies. Although the illustrations are pretty and the narration is sweet, the story stated that it would be the real story. However, this wasn't exactly the case: the narrator claimed that fairies do exist, and the whole story looked like it was trying very hard to defend the fake photographs; and that took a lot away from the beauty of this book.

I just wasn't a fan of this one. With a book like this, I expected more magical illustrations. Instead, these looked like the scribbles that I used to do when I was a kid, down to the uneven coloured-pencil fills and that weird overlap darkening you often get with markers. Some of the pictures looked more amateurish than others, which led to the book feeling kind of uneven.

The story fell sort of flat for me, too. Arthur Conan Doyle comes off looking rather stupid for believing and pushing the narrative so hard. (If you've ever seen the original photos, you'll probably agree that it's pretty obvious they're fake.) The fact that two little girls were able to fool so many people could've made for an interesting story, but that's not the direction this story took. In this book, the fairies were real all along, and while the girls did take photos of fake paper fairies, they admitted to their deceit (unlike it real life, where they kept up the charade for decades).

The subject matter is interesting, but the execution just didn't work for me here.