★★★★★ 5
Fabulous Fae Fantasy Adventure Romance ala the Labyrinth
I LOVED this book. You can blame it on Jareth the Goblin King, and years of watching the Labyrinth over and over...or you can blame it on the extremely talented writer, Natalia Jaster, who totally blew me away with this ferocious frolic through my favorite daydreams. I'm an earthy, woodsy, nature and animal loving girl so this really was the stuff my dreamscapes are made of...
Where to start? Obviously I'm a huge fan of the premise: Lark, a saucy, fiery, vibrant human girl must escape the clutches of her bad lay (yes you read that right) by crossing the threshold into Faerie - a scary and dark place where humans never return from, (or if they do they return without their minds). Along with her two sisters who followed her in, they must now face the consequences of their intrusion. Each must face a trial in one of the three Solitary Fae wildnerness areas, Lark landing on the Solitary Mountain where she must combat its ruler, the mysterious flute playing, javelin wielding Cerulean. Her challenge: to scale its labyrinthine peaks and valleys, and all its magical pockets in-between and make her way to the highest summit within 13 days. Of course nothing is as it seems in Faerie and its a much harder task than it might at first appear. A sort of mountainous maze with enchanted groves and deceiving vistas and all sorts of tricky fae and fauna? Yes Please!
I'm going to word geek out for a moment now: Jaster really created a wonderful cadence to her story with her use of sentence structure and word choice. There's almost a manic brilliance to some of it that FEELS just like being in that world would feel like: beautiful and terrifying, something your not sure you if want to run TO or run FROM, its carnal and cathartic, its a tangle and a finely honed tip, its all and nothing. Yes descriptions are meant to "show" us, but in this case - the juxtaposition of word choice, the dreamy AND the visceral, the sheer shapes of the words - really BROUGHT me there. Her descriptions could range from beautiful and ethereal to crass or destructive in one scope - just like the sharp edge of those fae teeth hiding behind their otherworldly beauty. Its all one here:
"It's a hopeless, grisly display, shimmering at the edges with sparks of magic. So many faces and souls - gorgeous to the point of hellish, frightful to the point of ethereal."
So yes I loved the plot, yes I loved the words, and yes I most definitely loved the dance between Lark and Cerulean. She does a great job of building the tension but also the confusion and conflicting emotions of both characters, and though in a sense it is a slow burn, when the heat does come its packed on ferociously in the best way possible: no holds barred. My oh my I loved it!
And now I will leave you with possibly my favorite description of a redhead ever (and describing one of the characters the next book will focus on, definitely excited for Puck and Junipers story):
"The reddest hair I've ever seen tumbles in waves from his head and sweeps his shoulders. I can't describe the vivid, inflammatory color, except that its warmer than rust, livelier than titan, and more provocative than scarlet. It's the erotic shade of carmine, or, if you're feeling morbid, the shit that pours from a fresh wound."
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Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2020