Faebound

Given how much I've enjoyed this author's other series - The Ending Fire - and am eagerly awaiting the final book in that series, I thought I would love this book but it was a huge disappointment for me.

There is a severe lack of world building in this book, so much that even by the mid-way point I still had no image of the world, the underground city, the Elves and the Fae, etc. I usually find that I can visualise the story even when world building is a little lacking but in this I was completely blind.

I also found the characters quite underdeveloped, at no point did I feel connected to them or have any feelings about them being in danger or their relationships growing. I was completely ambivalent to them which I think it worse than loving or hating them.

The plot was okay and was really the only thing which kept me going in the story, but it wasn't anything new in the genre and was fairly predictable.

Perhaps a personal issue for me, as I've read the author's books so closely together, is that I found a lot of the names in both series very similar, some of the side character names are nearly identical. It's just an odd choice when in a fantasy story you can literally make up anything, but perhaps I'm nitpicking.

Overall this one was a miss for me and I'm unlikely to continue in this series, but I am very excited for The Ending Fire to release later this year and will look for other books from this author.