Format: ebook
Release Date: January 1st, 2021
Age: Adult
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Goodreads
Rating: 5/5 Stars
Blogtober 2023: Day 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18
Firstly, thank you to Platkus for providing a copy of this via NetGalley – views remain my own.
This one, I admit, took me too long to get to. I think partially because I was expecting something a little more YA (not in a bad way!), if I’d known a bit more about it I would have read it sooner. I devoured this. It’s book 7 of the Supernatural Sisters series, but in can definitely be read as a standalone. I, however, am hoping to go back to the first book of the series and read them up to this one. Even as a standalone, there’s enough that gestures towards the larger story, and even a brief glance over the first 6 books reveals how they tie in, and with the way we’re given brief glimpses of these characters and stories in The Rose Daughter, it makes me really keen to read their tales in full.
Okay, focusing on the book at hand. Dreckly Jones has avoided heroics her whole life, taught by her father that the most important thing is to survive. However, when she’s approached (depending on how you look at it) by a group and told about other supernatural creatures going missing, it takes a lot of effort to walk away from them. Oh yeah, and Dreckly is a sprite, the result of a forbidden union between an earth elemental and a selkie.
Firstly, I think some writers are tempted to make the supernatural creatures in stories like this appear more in their late teens/early twenties, but here Lewis has thought out the rules around aging and we get a woman who presents as more middle aged, though in reality she’s 140-something. I loved that aspect, especially as the love interest is younger, and it feels like a dynamic we don’t get as often between immortal and not-immortal.
There’s a nice balance between the present and the past, too, with the chapters alternating and giving us Dreckly’s life story in one half and the present-day events in the other. The flashback chapters give us a strong sense of why Dreckly is, well, Dreckly, and makes for a really great blend of Historical and Urban Fantasy.
I loved the magic here, too, and the different paranormal creatures that inhabit this world. And the world building really is great, even jumping in at this point it’s easy to get a sense of the world and the history. It makes for a book that does exactly, I think, what an author would want a book like this do – serve perfectly as a standalone, but give just enough tantalizing crumbs to make the reader want to go back and read the rest of the series.
Dreckly forms friendships and alliances throughout, with shifters, demons, and more, and we get to see her go from someone who seems to keep to themselves, too scared of detection to form actual relationships, to someone who realises she can’t keep herself shut off from everyone. Like everything else in this book, it works really well.
If you want a bit of a different Urban Fantasy, one that contains plenty of present-day action as well as a more Historical setting alongside it, I definitely recommend this one. A really enjoyable read, and I can’t wait to dive back into this world.
Reading Challenge
The Disney Reading Challenge
Prompt: Sleeping Beauty – Briar Rose – a book with a rose on the cover/in the title
Progress: 16/40 Completed
Unwrapping Words 