A review by clovetra
Faebound by Saara El-Arifi

adventurous lighthearted mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

i’m gonna be honest and say. i’m a dumbass. i got an ARC to the sequel and hadn’t read this. so. here i am. tail in between my legs because i am stupid. and um. i dont think i would’ve picked this up otherwise. but i am defo excited to read the sequel!
i’ll be honest and say there were A Lot of elements of this i did not like. the plot twists were set up well, but they all came back to back to back i felt like i was getting whiplash from how much tea was being spilt. which is insane because before all 75 different plot twists were revealed, there was no plot. no tension. half the story is just lettle and yeeran being little horndogs, and the other half was worldbuilding. i’m not mad at the worldbuilding, lowkey learning about the elven lands & the life of the fae was FUNNNN. but idk i kind of feel like the focus was instead of the romance when a beautiful plot exploring the lives of the fae was Right There. but otherwise nothing really happens. like it took until 35% deep in this book for anything interesting to happen, and like 70% for the climax, and then that was resolved in like 4 pages 🧍
also with the plot twists… this is going to sound so fucking mean but most of them felt like something i’d read in fanfiction. something someone would write about their self-insert. like it was giving “hi im Y/N and actually im an elf and a fae and im a human and actually i am the most beautiful luxurious person and i have so many lovers because i am perfect”. do you get me?
the characters… oh the characters. i’m going to be honest and say i really only liked pila. she is my baby girl. other than that i only really cared for yeeran’s story because i knew she was a sapphic baddie. other than that she was alright, and only really pila warmed me up even the slightest towards yeeran. lettle was intriguing, but her plot annoyed me most of the time, and the same goes for rayan. i liked lettle a bit more than rayan tho cuz she is a fellow disabled baddie. furi was interesting but she felt very surface level in her depth. and everyone else is irrelevant and/or uninteresting.
so what did i like about this book? i don’t really know. i did enjoy the romance and the world building. i liked how some of the plot twists were nicely set up, even if they were cringe imo. 
i think this book had a lot of potential. i think i am just a hater because i couldn’t bond to any main character and plot elements kept breaking my immersion because i found them corny. 
oh well, let’s hope i like the sequel more!
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