Why are urban fairytales so deliciously appealing to many readers? Maybe it’s the nearness of magic – the girl at the corner store turned mysterious; the neighbourhood cats turned ominous harbingers; the far-away suddenly appearing in the everyday.

I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes, YA writer Jaclyn Moriarty’s first adult novel, is an urban fairytale that turns Sydney, Australia, into an enchanted cityscape. It is the story of the Zing family, who are hiding an explosive family secret. As this secret begins to unravel, three generations of Zings are forced to look at their own personal half-truths – the ones obscured by their elaborate deception.

The novel has the appeal of a charm bracelet, each piece put together with a glittering specificity, its narrative compelling and entertaining. The story skips between the perspectives of five women, each struggling toward a form of personal freedom. Teenage isolation is there in all its dismal detail, as are the lonely suburban wife and the confused twenty-something. But despite these familiar tropes, each story is set in a fascinating world of small magic – with spell books, family secrets in garden sheds, socks turning up in unusual places – and told in an upbeat narrative that interrupts itself with seemingly random documents and poetry. The real magic comes from the minute and sometimes miraculous daredevil flights of everyday life – in which, as the characters hope, one will always land safely on a bed of buttermilk pancakes.

Moriarty’s writing teeters between lithe, pleasing quirkiness and confusing wackiness – something like alternating between the Ferris Wheel and the Tilt-a-Whirl – with cumbersome adjectives lending the prose a cluttered feel. As the characters’ stories rush together, Moriarty gathers up the threads in a too-neat conclusion. Though she injects a touch of realism into the fairy-tale ending, the final chapters lack the rest of the novel’s charm and neat coincidences, and have a stitched-up feeling.

With its attention to the gritty everyday of grown-up life, this is clearly an adult title. Yet the novel has enough coming-of-age longing and confusion to function as a YA title as well. With mother-daughter book club questions to be posted online by the publisher, the book is obviously aimed at both markets.