eclecticreadsbyskye 's review for:

Faebound by Saara El-Arifi

4.0

adventurous emotional slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

---

 Stories of the gods and elvish prophecies drive this book.

We follow the stories of Yeeran, an elvish colonel, and Lettle, her diviner sister, This begins as a very military fantasy, as we follow Yeeran through her first day as colonel of the Waning army during the Forever War. She's given a prophecy by her sister, and in following it, she gets herself exiled.

Not wanting to be apart from her, Lettle and Yeeran's captain Rayan follow her into exile. What they don't expect is to encounter fae, who are just a part of their fairytales as far as most elves are concerned. They're then drawn into the fae world and their lives are turned upside down.

I did enjoy this book. The unique world building, the different magic system, and the different worlds and cultures was very interesting. I just wish everything had been explored a little more.

I also really love the diverse cast of characters, the normalization of queer characters and different sexualities and viewpoints of relationships, and the representation of characters with disabilities that weren't limited by those things. The hetero and sapphic romances were a breath of fresh air, though often felt more lust driven than deeper.

The story was rather slow in some parts, and that took me out of the book quite a bit. I really feel like the author was setting up for the next book in the series, and I hope that all this setup really shines through in the next book. I'm not sure if there were supposed to be big twists in this story, but to me it was all rather obvious how the prophesies would play out and how other events came to be.

Overall, I'm very happy that I read this, and loved a lot of the elements. It just missed the mark for me in being a truly amazing book. I have full confidence though, that it will find it's perfect readers out there.

 
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing the eARC for me to read before release!