Lore of the Wilds
Synopsis
In a land ruled by ruthless Fae, twenty-one-year-old Lore Alemeyu’s (POV character) village is trapped in a forested prison. Lore knows that any escape attempt is futile—her scars are a testament to her past failures. But when her village is threatened, Lore makes a desperate deal with a Fae lord. She will leave her home to catalog/organize an enchanted library that hasn’t been touched in a thousand years. No Fae may enter the library, but there is a chance a human might be able to breach the cursed doors.
She convinces him that she will risk her life for wealth, but really she’s after the one thing the Fae covet above all: magic of her own.
As Lore navigates the hostile world outside, she’s forced to rely on two Fae males to survive. Two very different, very dangerous, very attractive Fae males. When undeniable chemistry ignites, she’s not just in danger of losing her life, but her heart to the very creatures she can never trust.
Review
Lore as a protagonist has suffered an extraordinary amount of trauma at the hands of the Fae, and though it is a god who banished her people, the exiled humans (her people, as she calls them) remain faithful to the stars and the sky, praying for the day they can free themselves from their oppression and return home—wherever that may be. As Lore flees out into the world, she sees the land she’s been trapped within, and must weave her way through it, hiding so that no one discovers she is human. I like that Lore keeps a positive outlook and focuses on healing and helping despite the way she and her people have been ravaged. It’s a naive outlook, and it would not have boded well for her if she hadn’t been protected by her “guard” at every turn.
To be frank, there’s very little good I can talk about with this novel. It has decent bones with no meat and a slew of problematic themes. I’m shocked this made it to publication when it reads like a first draft. And I’m shocked it’s being marketed as Romantasy.
Critiques
To make this more concise, I’m breaking my critiques into sub-categories.
CRAFT: As I said above, this reads like a first draft. The novel comes off as distant and disjointed due to a classic issue of Telling over Showing. It keeps readers separated from the character, making it difficult to bond with Lore. At no point did I find myself aching for her they way I know I was meant too. Sbrana also did some weird prose with colloquialisms (within our world, but also within hers). The phrase “draw a picture, I’m sure it will last longer” was used, which pulled me out of the story at once because that’s essentially one of our modern-day sayings (Ch. 13). There were also colloquialisms to the world of the novel, but they were so inconsistent that, again, it felt like this was a first draft and the author was throwing everything out there to be decided upon later. “Goddess”, “Thistle and sage”, “Stars,” and more were used as exclamations at random. Since there was little to no world-building, they felt out of place. Sbrana also has repetition of plot and of prose. She repeats events, first by having Lore experience them, and then by having Lore reflect on them in depth—sometimes more than once. Beyond that, there are simple repetition errors that, again, should have been resolved in the drafting stage:
“‘Ok, I will help you get home, but we can’t go straight there. Chief Steward Vinelake will have soldiers looking for you, assuming you are headed home. We’ll need to buy enough time for him to call back his soldiers’” (Ch. 9).
“‘Before this morning, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. It’s like Queen Riella’s wine stopped the words, but they’ve finally come back this morning’” (Ch. 26).
And I get it—this all seems nitpicky. I would be inclined to agree. But these craft issues were persistent and pervasive throughout the entirety of the text, jarring the rhythm of the prose and consistently jolting me out of the story to the point were I was listening to the book, but not experiencing it.
CHARACTERS: The naivety of Lore was infuriating. She has so much trust in her oppressors, which baffles me because it’s clear that she has experienced physical wounds from the Fae, has been verbally tormented by the Fae, and has been kept as a prisoner by the Fae. She has not been manipulated into believing she’s inferior or lesser than, which would be different, because her character arc within this story would have shifted into one of discovery and rebellion. Lore fully understands the dehumanizing tactics that have been used by the Fae, and yet she trusts them without question. She believed the Fae Lord when he said he sent help to her people, she believed Asher in general, and she immediately got drunk with Finn’s sister and spilled every single secret that could have gotten her executed. It drove me crazy. (In fact, Lore comes off as childish and immature more than anything else. This read like a YA right up until the sex scene.)
RELATIONSHIP: This was set up to be an enemies-to-lovers, I believe. Lore tells us she is intimidated and scared of Asher when she first met him, and Asher seems disgruntled and annoyed by Lore. This lasted for all of a chapter before Asher becomes bemused by our FMC. Why these shifts in perspective by the MMC? I had no idea. (Until the end, when we find out he was using her the whole time.)
PLOT: As with the craft, the plot was disjointed. It seemed as though Sbrana wanted to include specific (and tropey) scenes. Therefore, while quite a bit happened in this novel, it also feels as though nothing happened. Every obstacle Lore faced was overcome with a miraculous level of little-to-no-planning and a HUGE glob of luck and plot armor. The world building only seemed to matter if it instantaneously helped the FMC solve a problem, and in those instances, the build came through as an info dump. This same principle applied to the magic system. Lore, with no knowledge of magic, somehow manages to wield her power and use it in new ways that she thinks up on the spot. Kind of like if you walked into a lab and just started putting different chemicals together, and each time whatever you wanted to happen with the reaction came to fruition exactly as planned. Unfeasible.
RAPE: This is what led me to a one star review. I’m not the target audience of breeding plots for the sake of shock factor/twists, and that’s what this felt like. At the end of the novel, Lore unveils a plan by the royal Fae to use human women as breeding stock for their own kind. In a magical scope of a prison tower, Lore finds that some of the women are already pregnant from rape, and that there are women currently tied to the beds awaiting a rapist. Which was disgusting. And though I know I was meant to be disgusted alongside the main character, the execution of this entire novel made such a plot point just gross in general. And it gets worse. In the final pages, Asher reveals himself to have been the Fae Lord who enlisted Lore into the library at the beginning of the novel. Surprise! He’s been manipulating her and lying to her the whole time. Which means the romantic interest is a man that Lore, if she had known his true identity, would not have consented to having sex with. And that ultimately means that she was raped as well. Not to mention the sex scene was icky in general, as th the MMC says things like this:
“‘I’m so much stronger than you,’ he crooned. ‘You should be afraid of me. In fact, you should push me away right now’” … “‘I could hurt you in more ways than you know. But I can’t seem to stop tasting you’” (Ch. 27).
That seems like a pretty huge red flag, but Lore was her typical trusting self and foolheartedly believed he wouldn’t hurt her. She even says this to him. I was baffled.
MISCELLANEOUS: The most detail given in the novel pertains to food. Lore describes her food more than she describes anything else. She isn’t a chef, nor did food seem vital to her character make-up in the beginning chapters, so this was random.
That fact that this got published as it is, and that FairyLoot chose it as the launch to their Romantasy subscription, has me stumped. Maybe because there was a magic library, which gets featured in the blurb and makes up maybe 10% of the novel content? But the “romantic interest” is a cruel, malicious Fae who tricks Lore, lies to Lore, and traps Lore. How is this romantic?
I’m so disappointed.
Content Note
See RAPE above. True to my tags, this will not be listed as Spice (despite being marketed as romantasy). The single sex scene, though consented to at the time, constitutes as rape because the FMC would not have agreed if she had known the who the MMC really was. Which makes me pretty appalled at this novel.
You can find more content warnings at the Trigger Warning Database
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