Reviews with content warning for Body horror - Un encantamiento de cuervos

Reviews tagging 'Body horror'

Un encantamiento de cuervos by Margaret Rogerson

30 reviews

moonchild_cos's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

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macliffe's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Uses a lot of tropes, but if you like those tropes like I did it I’d perfectly charming. A great palate cleanser. Like Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries meets The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea.

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laurenevlyn's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

The amount of times I was giggling and blushing throughout this book is actually insane. I thoroughly enjoyed An Enchantment of Ravens and had so much fun reading it. I definitely agree with my favorite booktuber, Caricanread, who says that this book is written like a fairytale. Truer words have never been spoken. The main part I enjoyed about this book was the romance. It was extremely fast-paced yet very believable and well done, which is a hard combination to achieve. Rook is the love of my life and Isobel made a wonderfully clever protagonist (and their chemistry is amazing as I said earlier)! All in all a wonderful book that I very much recommend!

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littleflowerfairy's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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magicshop's review against another edition

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adventurous dark hopeful medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

I wanted that smell more than anything I had ever wanted before. I wanted it with a terrifying thirst. Not him, exactly, but rather whatever great, mysterious change it represented—a promise that somewhere, the world was different.

you should read this book if...

you put a lot of stock into the unique atmosphere of a book/story
you want a short, easy-to-read autumn vibes plot with beautiful prose

the good

a likable main character. very heavy on the ymmv here as she's genuinely not that different from most ya heroines, but i liked her practicality and reliance on brains rather than her heart in most situations. it provided a good contrast to the male love interest, who's all heart, and served as a bit of an interesting genre bend.
to me the appeal of the story relied mainly on the worldbuilding and atmospheric qualities, both things it did especially well. it felt almost like a fairytale to read, in a pleasant way, especially
the ending sequence with all the tidbits about every character we'd met moving on with their lives
.
i really enjoyed the inclusion of "Craft" in the story, which means literally any activity humans perform that turns one thing into another, no matter how minimal (art, cooking, etc). fae, on the other hand, are incapable of change, metaphorically as well as literally, and require humans to perform these tasks for them. i kind of wish the book had either been longer or part one of a series, though, because i wanted to see much more of this aspect than we ended up with.
as an artist myself, i loved the pivotal role isobel's skills had on the plot. it wasn't a one-off mention or relagated strictly to the prologue, but in fact rather important, multiple times, in the course of the story.
gruesome monstrous fae creatures? sign me up!

the bad

the romance is very instalovey, and though it's further developed later on in the story, it never really manages to grow beyond that, in my opinion. i can almost see why isobel would be fascinated by rook, with him being the only fae to ever display emotion so openly. on top of that, being only 17, she's liable to be very easily impressionable despite all her carefulness to be responsible and measured in every aspect of her life. rook, on the other hand, is a centuries-old magical creature, who's certainly met and made friends with enough humans in his long life to not be so taken by a random 17 year old... right?? when relationships happen between immortals and mortals i usually need more interesting and far deeper reasons for the immortal to be so taken with the human, because one of the most interesting things about immortals is that they've lived so long that many things have lost their initial magic to them. what was it about isobel that sparked that flame again in rook's heart? we have no idea! and that's boring!
the author tries so hard to sell the romance as "forbidden" that she leaps across to the other side into nearly comical heternormative insensitivity. there's one passage later on in the book that sums up what i mean: "I had no way to prove that the love Rook and I felt for each other was real and that we deserved every desperate, foolhardy inch of it, and I was already tired, so tired, of bearing its weight as a failure. A crime." this would've been a banger had it been written about a queer couple, but alas, rogerson had no such excuse.
again, everyone's straight. everyone's white. worst of all, everyone's straight and white immortal beings. my dude, you cannot convince me in a million years that every immortal race wouldn't be queer as fuck as a rule after a couple centuries of existence to explore every aspect of sexuality and romance. anyway, in my head rook is brown, but he was only described as "tanned" i believe, which can be taken either way. so i'm not giving this any points on that front.
the plot structure is kind of a mess the more you think about it. they just
wander back and forth in a forest for 90% of the first half in various states of undress and injury, then some more for the 2nd half until they finally get to an Important Place, and then rook decides to do a fakeout a challenge @ the alder king and run away (?????). i'm no proper writer myself but even i know a little polish and less meandering would've done this book a lot of favors.

the complicated

i don't really know what to think of gadfly
literally playing chess with 99% of the plot and winning. he turned out to be a bit of a walking deus ex machina and took away a lot of my interest in the actual story after the reveal (i'd suspected it since isobel found out he was the reason rook met her, but i'd hoped against it the whole time lol).
rook is boring to me, period. this doesn't go in the bad section because it almost gave him a manic pixie dream boy quality when compared to isobel, who was far more appealing as a character, and that's a little bit of a positive in the end. i do love reversals of that trope.
i shipped isobel more with a character she met twice but had more in common with and better scenes with than with rook (
aster
). i rest my case
too much romance focus. i deserved more creepy fairy worldbuilding instead 😞

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alanafiuza's review against another edition

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emotional relaxing medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix

5.0

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epsyphus's review against another edition

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adventurous funny hopeful fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

I really liked this. It was a cool take on fair folk/human relations. The romance was a lot more love-at-first-sight than I typically like, but it didn’t really detract from my enjoyment.

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lillythebluepaladin's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I really wish I had read this Rogerson book first before Vespertine, because you can absolutely tell that this is her first published work, and that she has involved since. But the fact that THIS is her first work, tells you that she’s gonna go down as one of the best female YA authors from the 2010/2020’s.

Very few things that annoyed me, it was kindaaaa insta lovey, I still enjoyed Isobel and Rook so much omfg yes they were adorable, and I personally have an ick for whenever a book goes into the “oooh, time for a make over, let’s get you into pretty dresses, uuuh pretty pretty Barbie princess dress” mode, which this book did do a lot later on. (I just read The Cruel Prince and ACOTAR, at this point I just think it’s a part of YA Fae Court Fantasy, so that’s probably just something I have to work on). Also if you're an adult woman like me who doesn't really enjoy reading about teens getting it on, theres like a page or two you will have to skip, but I'm just being really nitpicky.

BUT AGAIN, Margaret Rogerson has a serious talent for giving beautiful and very detailed descriptions of her worlds and their characters, the banter in her works are perfect for teenage girls, the female gaze in these books are chefs kiss 🤌

I’m gonna read Sorcery Of Thorns later this year, I cannot wait✨

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darkefyres's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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shushkeepitdown's review against another edition

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adventurous dark hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Good and easy read. I love the characters, stories about Fae are always so strange but I do find them amusing. I would recommend this if you want to read a book which has tense moments but isn't overwhelming.

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