Nice idea, annoying characters, tone-deaf prose.
The idea is that actually met the fairies; that his wife was abducted and they had to wile their way back to the mortal world, through Court politics that provided inspiration for his love poetry and his dramas. has done half of it much better, but there's room for another try.
The prose makes my eyes roll so hard I can't focus, though; that and the direct-from-anime hermaphrodite fairy prince:
A prince, he thought he looked, a wronged prince, the color of his attire the external expression of his inner tumult.
Yet, how should a prince look who knows his brother has murdered their parents and now sits, remorseless, on his stolen throne?
There's more 'attire' in the second para, but I can't bring myself to repeat it. It's not the feebly precious words that slay me, it's the murder they do to the rhythms of the sentences.
Will and Nan are much better characters, earthy and foolish. Nan gets the best prose, sometimes plain sometimes not:
Will! He stood at the edge of the river, but in the mortal world, so that his feet sank in the mud to the ankle. The rain that fell soaked his poor wool suit, and made him look like a wet cat, when all its fur—the ornament and grace of its state—clings to its poor frail frame and leaves the cat nothing more than a bag of bones, pitiful and pitiable.
ISBN: 0-441-00860-7