Sorcha never believed her grandmother when she warned her
about the fairies, when she took away Sorcha’s violin and forbid her from music
– a fate that, for a girl born with the mystical voice of the druids, is almost
impossible to imagine
She learned how right her grandmother was when she fell
into a fae’s clutches and it was only by chance and her long buried powers that
she managed to escape. Now she’s much more careful – but the fae have still
come looking for her; Elada with his claims of love and alliance and the Prince
who wishes to enslave her for his own terrible needs. Worse, there are many fae
with long memories of the druids’ abuses – and are still bitterly seeking
revenge.
The framework of this book is interesting. The underlying
world building is excellent – we have the ancient druids and fae with a
terrible history that is interestingly balanced on both sides. There’s a lot of
hatred to bury that is especially difficult and complicated given the immortal
nature of the fae who, of course, remember the atrocities the druids committed
against them and their loved ones. Asking them to just let it go is
complicated. We have at least 3 different fae factions who, to a greater or
lesser degree, all fear the Prince successfully bringing the court back. But
they all have dramatically different views when it comes to humans and
especially druids – the politicking as these groups try to work together but
clash is excellent to navigate.
But when you look at the details it doesn’t follow
through so well. There’s too much call-back to characters from previous books
(and I think part of this is, I admit, from my missing the second book), like
Conn and Beth and Helene – I’m not sure why they’re even in this book since
they didn’t really add anything to it.
The plot itself starts quite well – though romance is a
large part and (as mentioned below), I’m not a fan of it. Sorcha is interesting
enough – but the ending is a rather clichéd kidnapping complete with “I must go
alone because bad guy said so” which is so infuriatingly overdone and hardly
ever makes sense – especially considering Sorcha’s complete ignorance over what
she’s dealing with. We have a side order of trusting the bad guys to keep their
word (complete non-spoiler: they don’t).
And relying on her super power kicking in despite her being very new to
it, barely able to control it, not even able to use it most of the time AND not
expecting the bad guys to have a counter measure for even though they know she
has it and are all super worried because of that. As an extra bonus, the bad
guys who super-duper want her dead, are going to wait a long time before they
actually kill her.
