I'm never a huge fan of novels that start with someone lying to someone else, and we all know it's going to come out, and everyone is going to be pissed about it. But that said, I still really liked this book, and the series. The ending leaves me hoping there's more in the series, I'd definitely read them.

I liked this, and I think I liked it more because of Joel Leslie's narration. The number of voices he used, and the range, was phenomenal.

I liked seeing everyone in the book...From David and Alun to Mal and Bryce and even the Faerie Queen and Amon.

I liked the plot and how it was all wrapped up.

What I wanted more of was the relationship between Niall and Gareth. For a 200 year seperation, after both of them thought the other dead, I wanted more of them. More angst, more devotion and poning, more everything really.

All in all, it was ok, but I expected more.

2.5 stars

I didn't enjoy this one nearly as much as the first two, due to the actions of the main characters, but it was still an overall enjoyable read. Check out the full review on my blog.

Ugh, for a lot of this book I wanted to thump Gareth so hard but also give him a massive hug.

The overarching plot which has been running since the start of the series kicks I'm big time here and we finally get to know what exactly happened between Niall and Gareth 200 years ago.

Both men have spent centuries apart, living with the consequences of both the lies they were told and their own choices.

How they come to terms with that makes up the majority of this romance and at times it's both heartbreaking and immensely frustrating.

Unlike the first two books this one is very much focused on just the two men, with only sporadic appearances from Bryce and David and Alun and Mal trapped in Faerie.

It made for a more thriller style pacing as the hunt to find out what was going on interwove closely with Gareth and Niall's on-going problems.

Obviously, as it's a romance and not a thriller we know there's going to be a happy ending and I loved the way it was orchestrated.

I think Bryce and Mal are still my favourite couple but I enjoyed this one very much too.

Niall made a bet and lost his heart.

Lasting love requires trust, and trust requires honesty. Gareth and Niall's chemistry is instantaneous and undeniable, but what they don't say leaves them mired in 200 years of pain. Untangling their feelings won't be easy, and first they have to decide if they even want to try. Everything seems to hit these two at once and I was rooting for them since the first book in the series. (I didn't know Niall was alive then, but I wanted Gareth to be happy). I thoroughly enjoy this universe EJ has built, and the sweet/stubborn people that inhabit it.

This is the second time I have tried to read this book. This time I got to 55% and I still dislike both MCs who don’t have much interaction with the characters I do like. Sorry I didn’t make it to the actual action.

We've seen Gareth Kendrick in the last two Fae Out of Water books. The last true bard of Faerie, he's had kind of a crappy life. First his brother sent him to be trained by dead bards (since there weren't any live ones around to do the training. Then his human lover was killed by an Unseelie Fae. And not just any Unseelie, it was none other than the new king!
Niall O’Tierney's life hasn't been any better. He's the son of the last king, half-brother of the new king and he's spent the last two hundred years avoiding his one true love so that he wouldn't be forced to kill the man. Well, to kill Gareth. So when he sees Gareth's shock his first instinct is to fake amnesia. Uh huh. But that's not their biggest problem, there's a threat to all of Faerie that only Gareth and Niall can contain.
Probably my least favorite of the three books. Both Gareth and Niall were just a little too much in their own heads. That being said, I enjoyed this whole series overall and look forward to more from Russell.

~ 3.5 Stars ~

I wanted to love this third novel in the Fae Out of Water series, Bad Boy’s Bard, as much as I did the first two. I was excited to finally understand why the third Kendrick brother, Gareth, was so much of a loner—and so angry with his brothers. I was intrigued by the fact that it had been hinted at that Gareth had once loved a human and had been pining for him for over two hundred years. I wanted to finally understand the depth of his grief—a sadness that covered him so completely that he denied his fae home and retreated from his family to the point where they barely spoke to each other. All this plus the fact that he was the last living fae bard, whose musical powers could sway even the hardest of hearts, had set my imagination on fire, and I could not wait to get my hands on this third installment.

I will tell you that this story does have some incredibly thrilling action sequences, and that Gareth’s lost lover, Niall, is truly a gorgeously written character, one that just about ripped my poor heart in two. His life for the past two hundred years has been a living hell, and then some, and when his brother, the newly crowned king, restores him and deposes their insanely evil father at the end of book two, I was standing up and cheering. The third book starts out so well, setting up the first moments when Niall and Gareth will come face-to-face after so much time apart. It is teeming with characters from the previous book while giving us a few new ones, bad and good and somewhere in between.

We get to meet Gareth’s supernatural bandmates, who go a long way in both morally supporting Gareth and keeping him grounded. But, it is really Niall who steals the show here. Unlike the previous two books where it was the Kendrick brothers who outshone their counterparts, Gareth almost disappeared in this story for me. In the previous stories, where both Alun and Mal were transformed by their new found loves, Gareth barely seemed to change at all, and, quite frankly, I had trouble warming up to him because he came off as so very selfish and self-absorbed. Admittedly, he didn’t really know what Niall had suffered all those years, and Niall refused to tell him, but still, I found it hard to believe that Gareth had pined so deeply for Niall when he barely seemed invested in the relationship from the get-go. Rather, it was Niall who stole my heart, who grew and changed as the story unfolded, and who selflessly loved Gareth so very much and showed that love time and again.

I did feel that this final book dealt with the history and past details of the seelie and unseelie heritage much more adroitly than it’s predecessors. Rather than getting bogged down or jolted from the main plot line by a heavy handed history lesson, I felt the author wove the past and present together fairly seamlessly, and it served to enlighten and further the plot overall. But where that aspect of the novel excelled, the love story itself seemed to falter. I was disappointed that this incredibly gifted bard seemed lost when it came to the language of love and how to woo the man he’d been missing for hundreds of years.

All in all, Bad Boy’s Bard neatly tied up the many plot points that had been so cleverly dangling in the previous two stories, and restored the last of the Kendrick brothers to happiness. I just wish we could have seen more of a sweeping romance to close out this final chapter.

Reviewed by Sammy for The Novel Approach