Book Review: Flicker (Crown of Fae - prequel)
Flicker (Crown of Fae - Prequel) by Sharon Ashwood
4 stars
Category: Young Adult
Note: Novella-length. Only $0.99 cents on Kindle
Summary: Dragon Princess Flissitania (Fliss) is sent to a prestigious Fae boarding school in the South in the hopes that it will be far away from the war against the Shades. But on the way, their travel party is attacked and Fliss takes shelter with a peasant woman named Anna, who leaves the cabin shelter to protect them from something outside. Fliss yearns to be treated as an adult and help defend her homeland along side her older brothers. She hates being treated like a child, and especially hates the school where she doesn’t fit in and is bullied by the other students. One student, Laren, the son of an ambassador, decides that Fliss is interesting and tags along with her as she hunts for Anna who seemed to vanish into thin air. The hunt for Anna, uncovers the Shades lurking nearby who start taking over the town, and attack the school to kill off all of the young magical students there.
Comments: This is a basic epic fantasy read. Dragon shifter, check, princess, check, epic medieval world, check, random magical elemental powers, check, and enemy forces to fight, check. Wasn’t really anything interesting to the school. It was your basic magical academy, without much thought put into classes, except to use the history class as a means to infodump the background history of this world (boring class. I would have slept through it). I wasn’t getting much of a mental image of the shades, so I didn’t really see them as much of a threat through most of the book, just as a generic enemy fighting them (though I did love the Firebird in that one scene). I think the most interesting thing about the shades was that they were using portals to go to the modern world and bits of modern technology was making its way back over. Like a random wristwatch. And I figured out why the shades didn’t make much of an impression on me. Through the book they had just been cloaked men. Nothing special to them. Just the usual evil army trying to stomp out all of the good forces. At just past the middle mark, one is killed and they see what was underneath the cloak. They look rotted underneath. Now where have I heard of a group of cloaked villains that look rotted underneath? *cough* Ringwraiths *cough* Wasn’t really anything interesting to the dragon shifters either. They’re just the same as the dragon shifters that are in all of the other books on the market these days. It didn’t even really explore them as dragon except as a mode of travel and as a physical weapon for fighting. Why was Fliss white as a dragon? Are all female dragons white? And stereotypically it’s got werewolves in it too (can’t seem to have one without the other). I did like that Fliss does have character growth in this. From wanting to not be treated as a child and fight against the evil, and showing off her battle skills and making her family proud of her. To learning that war and battle is to worry about your friends getting hurt or killed, to seeing death and realizing her own mortality and how far the enemy reach really is, realizing she could cause the death of others around her, and realizing that she is still young with a lot to still learn. In all, nothing really sparked my interest in this world (except maybe Laren and the head mistress).
4 stars
Category: Young Adult
Note: Novella-length. Only $0.99 cents on Kindle
Summary: Dragon Princess Flissitania (Fliss) is sent to a prestigious Fae boarding school in the South in the hopes that it will be far away from the war against the Shades. But on the way, their travel party is attacked and Fliss takes shelter with a peasant woman named Anna, who leaves the cabin shelter to protect them from something outside. Fliss yearns to be treated as an adult and help defend her homeland along side her older brothers. She hates being treated like a child, and especially hates the school where she doesn’t fit in and is bullied by the other students. One student, Laren, the son of an ambassador, decides that Fliss is interesting and tags along with her as she hunts for Anna who seemed to vanish into thin air. The hunt for Anna, uncovers the Shades lurking nearby who start taking over the town, and attack the school to kill off all of the young magical students there.
Comments: This is a basic epic fantasy read. Dragon shifter, check, princess, check, epic medieval world, check, random magical elemental powers, check, and enemy forces to fight, check. Wasn’t really anything interesting to the school. It was your basic magical academy, without much thought put into classes, except to use the history class as a means to infodump the background history of this world (boring class. I would have slept through it). I wasn’t getting much of a mental image of the shades, so I didn’t really see them as much of a threat through most of the book, just as a generic enemy fighting them (though I did love the Firebird in that one scene). I think the most interesting thing about the shades was that they were using portals to go to the modern world and bits of modern technology was making its way back over. Like a random wristwatch. And I figured out why the shades didn’t make much of an impression on me. Through the book they had just been cloaked men. Nothing special to them. Just the usual evil army trying to stomp out all of the good forces. At just past the middle mark, one is killed and they see what was underneath the cloak. They look rotted underneath. Now where have I heard of a group of cloaked villains that look rotted underneath? *cough* Ringwraiths *cough* Wasn’t really anything interesting to the dragon shifters either. They’re just the same as the dragon shifters that are in all of the other books on the market these days. It didn’t even really explore them as dragon except as a mode of travel and as a physical weapon for fighting. Why was Fliss white as a dragon? Are all female dragons white? And stereotypically it’s got werewolves in it too (can’t seem to have one without the other). I did like that Fliss does have character growth in this. From wanting to not be treated as a child and fight against the evil, and showing off her battle skills and making her family proud of her. To learning that war and battle is to worry about your friends getting hurt or killed, to seeing death and realizing her own mortality and how far the enemy reach really is, realizing she could cause the death of others around her, and realizing that she is still young with a lot to still learn. In all, nothing really sparked my interest in this world (except maybe Laren and the head mistress).
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