Author(s): Meredith Holmes
Genre: Adventure, Fantasy, Romance
Publisher/Year: Drollerie Press/2008
-Interview: The Write Type-Multi Author Musings Blog
-Webpage/Blog: Meredith Holmes
Synopsis:
The darkness tasted like bitter bark and earth, sharp berries, and cold water. I could not feel it as it came over me but I could smell it, taste it, hear it . . .
When Alfhild was a little girl, her grandmother called her a fairy princess and told her all of her favorite tales.
She’d never imagined they were real.
Anxious to avoid the swarming reporters and ghoulish souvenir hunters who won’t leave her alone when her brother Gulliver is tried and acquitted for multiple murders he almost certainly committed, a grown up Alfhild changes her name to Lorelei and flees Louisiana to the sanctuary she inherited from her grandmother, the ancestral home in England.
All is well until she wakes one morning to find a naked man in her rosebush.
And the games begin . . .
Lorelei’s inauspicious introduction to Cadfael, the seductively beautiful Unseelie prince, does not prepare her for becoming a pawn between the ancient queens of the faerie courts, Iseult and Mabd. Her big mouth and smartass attitude turn tension into war between the faerie clans: the Seelie, hiding behind golden lies and their resplendent beauty; and the Unseelie, long considered the fearsome things that go bump in the night.
Her brother works for the Seelie queen. The man she loves is in line to inherit the Unseelie throne. And both of them are determined to have Lorelei on their side.
The real world thinks she's been murdered, her house has been turned into a crime scene, and there are creatures on both sides of the war who call her a traitor. She doesn't want to know what they do to traitors. Too bad the excitement didn't end at a naked man in her rosebush. Things are a lot weirder now.
Review: This seems to be my year for media about the Fae and Unseelie! Between Hakushaku to Yousei (Earl and Fairy) anime, Eyes Like Stars* by Lisa Mantchev, Wonderous Strange by Lesley Livingston, My Soul To Take by Rachel Vincent and now Unseelie...I'm just a little in heaven right now reading about lesser known mythical creatures.
If I had been
While I enjoyed Unseelie a lot, I felt at times that it should have been broken up into two or three books. A lot happens in Unseelie, but at the same time you aren't given time to digest what happened before when something new occurs. The e-book runs at 400 pages (roughly) there's plenty of Big Happenings, but the book could have benefited from focusing on one Big Happening and then writing another book about the Next Big Happening and so forth, to flesh out some characters (and motivations) and give the reader time to adjust to the changes.
I loved the interaction between Cadfael and Lorelei. The two of them sparked, giggled, fought and irritated the living daylights out of each other, but their conversations were always fun. Du, a cait-sith (a feline fae as it were, not related to the Sith of Star Wars thank you), is an amusing a quirky character. He was a little abrasive at first, but I grew to like him a lot by the end.
There's some assumption made that the reader will at least recognize some of the inhabitants of the Unseelie and Seelie Courts without too much prompting from the characters within. This was fine for me, since I grew up on these stories, but for those not really attuned to the Celtic lore confusion might abound until someone (usually Du or Cadfael) takes the time to remind Lorelei that she's being thick-headed and should remember things better.
Overall I enjoyed Unseelie a lot. I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a fantasy read that's both humorous but with dark touches or who found themselves wanting to know a little more about the creatures after reading other Fae related books.
