2 Feather Duster Stars⭐
Spicy Level: 🌶️🌶️.5/5

What was very cleverly disguised as the perfect book for me, turned into the personification of the majority of the pet peeves I have in books.

These are very specific pet peeves so if this sounds like the book for you I hope you enjoy it!

This book follows four POV's. We have Boys - the broody Prince of Darkness, Ciaran, his birdy cousin, Kes. The girls are a little red-haired witch, Etain and a tree Nymph, Anin. All of them essentially find their paths crossing on the night of the new moon when the veil between the Fae realm and the Human realm can be crossed. The boys make a bet to capture the best prize, and as fate would have it, their prizes are the girls who are both running from their lives.

The first thing that really bothered me about this is basically chapter two it is revealed that the couples are fated mates, yet all four characters experience the same repetitive internal dialog of is it just attraction? Is there something else? What is going on?. This would have been fine if it were not ALL FOUR CHARACTERS going through this. Nothing felt new or different. It was the same thing over and over that each was dealing with.

The second thing that turned me off was by 24% of the book, our one couple is at the point of professing undying eternal love...by 24%. Which to make it worse is basically 2 days into them knowing each other. While the other couple is VERY slow burn... for one couple to be professing this level of love - is a little too instalovie for me.

The characterisation was a little lacking. I think the most developed characters were Kes and Seasmus (the Human captured with Etain) but it also felt very typical cookie-cutter personalities. The overly flirtatious guy and the religious shortsighted zealot. The rest of the characters felt very surface-level and generic.

The book in my opinion just lacked some foundational editing as the aspects of repetition and not deep character development showed. Most of the book could be summarised as seeing the same thing happen over and over again. The characters would meet in a room, eat and have discussions and then one of them would end up in the bathroom taking a bath or shower...Any conversation or major interaction with an external character to the four felt very brief, rushed and quick. We were often just told conversations happened instead of seeing the exchange of dialogue.

It also wasn't just the plot that felt repetitive but the actual sentences...
The following was taken from Ciaran's POV about Etain at 47% into the book-

The following was taken from Kes's POV about Anin at 49%

Then there were aspects of the actual writing style I didn't like. The dialogue felt very "old fashioned". Like it fell into the trap that to make us believe they were royal and Fae they needed to talk in Victorian English - there was not one contraction in the book. Any shouldn't, wouldn't, couldn't, hadn't, was should not, would not, could not, had not. Now I take it that this might have been a very cognisant decision in the writing style, but it led to dialog sounding forced and unnatual.

One thing I really DO want to commend is I LOVED seeing the worldbuilding - which was really a massive strength of this book (and one of the reasons why I kept reading). The fae were not just "pretty humans". Our main characters have black eyes, dark grey skin and feathers for hair. All aspects I haven't seen done much in books with Fae - so it was refreshing to see now.

I really did try to like this book and it really does have the elements of being great, but with the numerous aspects I didn't like this was not the book for me.