Title: The Faerie Pact

Author: pepsi_panda

Genre: Fantasy

Quick Summary: Grandma betrayed the faeries. Now the granddaughter has to fix her mess. Kind of.

Thoughts:

I have some conflicting feelings about this book.

There are a lot of interesting things about this book. The beginning is quite solid, which had me excited... but I felt kind of let down the more I read.

There's a lot of good here and I'll start with that. The mystery surrounding Miranda's grandmother in the beginning is good, and the whole... "they're her family but they don't act like it" aspect in the beginning as well. I like that the magic has a physical manifestation and that it involves words and books. Really, the faerie realm is nice [relatively]. I also like most of the characters.

I... don't like Wisp and his "friend" as much because the elven realm arc was short-lived, so I think that arc should've been stretched out more.

This book needs a lot of editing. There's a lot of filtering [so much "seemed to" and "feels"...] and typos [dessert over desert] and also sentences that are complex just to be complex. Several times I noted sentences that took ten words to say what could've been said better in three... moreso in the beginning chapters, though.

This POV really bothers me. If this is what omniscient is supposed to look like... I dislike it. Several times in a scene we'll jump from one person and their feelings to someone else and honestly I feel like shifting to limited and focusing on ONE person per scene would make this book a whole lot stronger. We're focused on Catherine's sorrow and anger, for example. I don't need to know how Miranda's dad is feeling. Omniscient can work I just. Don't think it does for this story and using it dampens a lot of the emotional impact this book could have. 

I never really catch on to how old Miranda herself is. It's mentioned she's a teenager and I'm guessing about... mmm. 14. I'm guessing she's fourteen. Which, if that's the case, that's fine. But if she's older than that, then both her and the writing could stand to be "aged up" a bit to reflect this. I kind of feeling like I'm reading a middle grade book, which isn't inherently bad but it IS if Miranda herself is older than 14. 

The book also kind of just... ends. I'm not sure if there's going to be a sequel or not [I'd hope so?] but things just kinda. End right in the middle of the conflict. We've been building up and building up and building up and then we get to the last chapter and there's very little actual pay-off. I think that was the biggest disappointment I faced with this book, honestly. There should be a satisfying conclusion and there was not in this case.

I wish I had more nice things to say, because this book DOES have a lot of potential to it. It just needs a lot of fixing first.