Review: Book Review from Sandy at Magical Manuscipts
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 14, 2012
When I first started reading this book, I wondered if I was actually going to end up finishing it.  For a moment, I thought that there were writing errors in it, but then I imagined Ania as the foreign girl who came to England when she was around thirteen.  When I started thinking that way then the strangeness of the writing became a foreign accent and it became so much easier to read.  This book was written in first voice, present tense.The story is about a girl who leaves her controlling mother to go to a university in Swansea - and what happens from there is something mysterious.The characters aren't bad.  Ania struggles against her mother and her mind when she goes to Swansea, gets attacked and then starts to see Gabriel, who is a sprite or faery.  She displays a staunchness and a sense of vulnerability all throughout the book.  I really don't know how to feel about her morals though - even though she fights her feelings for Gabriel.  But, I won't go to far into that because you need to read the book to discover what I'm talking about.I think the thing that seemed strange to me was, outside of her ex-boyfriend, she didn't really seem to have any friends.  None that were really mentioned anyway.  The friends she made were from Swansea.Gabriel was an enigma to me.  I didn't really get a sense of him.  He came in and out of the scenes like a Jack-in-the-Box.  All I knew was that he was fighting against his relationship with Ania, could die if others found out about it and, well, I can't say, because that would be a spoiler.  But, even with the lack of character development, there was enough about him that I really liked.  He's kind of crush-worthy.It was the plot that sold me on the book.  There was enough going on to keep me interested and the ending was perfect - even if it was a cliffhanger.  I liked the whole reason behind her assault - not that she was assaulted.  I also liked that this book was about Faeries as well.The thing that I really didn't like about this book is that most of the paragraphs took up half the screen on my Kindle.  It wasn't that they weren't proper paragraphs, it was more that the sentences were long.  Still, it made it very hard to read and even harder to keep my concentration, which caused me to stop reading it several times.The pace of the book was kind of slow, which didn't help with the problem I had above and some of the writing felt stiff - like it didn't flow as easily as it should.It's hard to know who to recommend this book to - fantasy lovers sure, but this book is not for anyone who is looking for a book that is clean.  It's not.  As the warning says there are scenes in this book that are not appropriate for anyone who isn't a mature teen or new adult.