This retelling has the funniest Rumpelstiltskin I’ve come across so far.

And the most irritating.

Ah, but the princess more than makes up for this clumsy and out-of-touch Fae lord who annoyed me more times than he made me laugh. Because Gisele is unique amongst princesses: she isn’t young but in her forties, she isn’t particularly beautiful, she has no striking attributes of any kind, she has no magic, she will inherit nothing, no one seeks her hand in marriage, and to top it all off, she is cursed.

And it’s all the fault of Rumpelstiltskin, who in this world has no name because he lost it through distraction and failure to plan well and foresee the consequences of his deal with Queen Bianka, Gisele’s mother, who promised him her firstborn in exchange for spinning straw into gold but failed the test of guessing the Fae’s name, and that is why Gisele is now a debt to be collected.

Ah, but the clumsy and clueless Fae lord hasn’t even bothered to remember that he has to collect this debt and take the princess away. So after decades of waiting in vain and noticing that her curse is getting worse, Gisele must make a decision:

On her fortieth birthday, Princess Gisele of Isshia realised she was going to have to save herself.

The only way to save herself is to go to Fairyland and beat Rumpelstiltskin’s arse propose a new deal to the Fae sorcerer that will settle her mother’s unpaid debt and thus break the curse weighing on her. It’s more than an inconvenient curse but worse than its seemingly harmless description suggests, because she carries a curse of aversion: people round her avoid her as much as possible, the sight of her unsettles people, and it hurts physically to touch her, so she has been raised separately from her two brothers, has no friends or ladies-in-waiting, and is very lonely. Only animals don’t avoid her or feel like they’ve been electrocuted if she touches them.

And so the princess sneaks off to Fairyland, finds Malediction, Mal for short—that’s what she calls him because he has no name and she has to address him somehow—and . . . Well, she falls in love with him, what else is there to do?

But not so fast, because this book may be long but both the plot and the romance are slow-burn, very slow at times. Not that I wouldn’t complain about the absence of insta-love.

Truthfully, there isn’t much to analyse (or criticise) in this book. It’s one of those stories that are concocted with generous quantities of sugar and humour to make you laugh and have a good time, and there’s a lot of silly and goofy stuff that the main characters and their friends do, as well as comical but capricious creatures like Skymallow (the sentient house with an opinion of her own about everything) and Zingiber (the talking cat that thinks everyone not an animal is ugly, be it human or fae), and other Fae beings that come and go. We don’t see much of Fairyland, but it does feel “active” through the main characters’ eyes. The whole plot centres on the main characters’ adventures as they attempt to recover Mal’s missing name, which he lost in a rather reckless manner, as explained quite early. And they are funny adventures, even the chapter titles are meant to be funny, such as the one that sounds like a tribute to Monty Python called “Strange Women Lying in Streams.”

How much you enjoy this book will depend on your sense of humour. For me, written humour doesn’t usually work so well as visual humour: I tend to laugh more at slapstick comedy films than at comical stories; written humour is more miss than hit with me. What’s more, this author bears a resemblance to T. Kingfisher that wouldn’t have elevated her in my eyes if I had known of this beforehand, but luckily Lancaster doesn’t tend to force the joke like Kingfisher does, and so even though she has resorted to the same formula of an unconventional, stereotype-breaking older woman protagonist wrapped up in a Grumpy/Sunshine romance with a scatterbrained partner, Lancaster does it much better. Perhaps because she has a sense of humour that takes itself less seriously and she lets her characters be as scatterbrained as they like. And, above all, her unusual woman protagonist doesn’t suffer from the Not Like Other Girls syndrome that afflicts Kingfisher’s female protagonists.

I liked How to Find a Nameless Fae quite a bit for two reasons: the one I just described, and the blend of “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Beauty and the Beast.”

He looked more like a gentleman poet than a dread sorcerer. Rumpled red curls, embroidered waistcoat, complicated neckcloth, and enough jewelry to stir envy in a court dandy.

Except no court dandy she knew had furry cat ears or a tufted tail twitching behind him.

Yes, Malediction’s appearance makes him the Beast in this story, but in his case there is no curse at play that transformed him into one; his is another kind of “curse.” One that is largely self-inflicted. He’s truly a feline-looking Fae, neither human nor humanoid Fae, which may make the intimate scenes with the very human Gisele uncomfortable for some readers. And there are several, explicit ones at that that describe the nature of Mal’s unmentionables. That’s why it’s also important to take this story as pure comedy and not overanalyse it. The B&B component is just one touch here and another touch there, because the main story this book retells is “Rumpelstiltskin,” and to tell the truth, I probably wouldn’t have detected the B&B vibe if it weren’t for the fact that this story borrows elements from other retellings of the fairy tale.

All in all, it’s a cute and sweet yarn, but definitely not “clean,” So if you are the sort of reader that prefers their stories free of spice, do take that into consideration if you want to read this book.