Hello everybody!
Today I am reviewing the 2017 fantasy novel, An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson. This is Rogerson’s debut novel.
Title: An Enchantment of Ravens
Author: Margaret Rogerson
Genre: Young Adult | Fantasy
Length: 304 pages
Rating: 3.5 Stars
About the Book
With a flick of her paintbrush, Isobel creates stunning portraits for a dangerous set of clients: the fair folk. These immortal creatures cannot bake bread or put a pen to paper without crumbling to dust. They crave human Craft with a terrible thirst, and they trade valuable enchantments for Isobel’s paintings. But when she receives her first royal patron—Rook, the autumn prince—Isobel makes a deadly mistake. She paints mortal sorrow in his eyes, a weakness that could cost him his throne, and even his life.
Furious, Rook spirits Isobel away to his kingdom to stand trial for her crime. But something is seriously amiss in his world, and they are attacked from every side. With Isobel and Rook depending upon each other for survival, their alliance blossoms into trust, perhaps even love . . . a forbidden emotion that would violate the fair folks’ ruthless laws, rendering both their lives forfeit. What force could Isobel’s paintings conjure that is powerful enough to defy the ancient malice of the fairy courts?
So an Enchantment of Ravens was a highly anticipated novel of mine for the majority of 2017. I have been seeing and hearing non-stop of how great it is from bookstagrammers, reviewers and more. And I read the synopsis filled with faeries, art, and intrigue and I needed to read it!
This year of 2017 has been a year of fantasy and contemporary for me. And I’ve been loving more and more the use of the Fae in stories and how each author interprets this well known idea and forms it into a unique, interesting world about the magical Fae worlds. And Margaret Rogerson seemed to do that.
Throughout the entirety of the book, I was in love with idea of this book world.
Rogerson has her faeries unable to do Craft- any art, writing, dance, even cooking, the Fae cannot do anything that involves creativity- and it was a really interesting concept. Seeing how the Fae got by without preparing food, to using humans to create them portraits, clothing and more was done rather well.
Throughout the book, we keep hearing of the ‘Good Law’ , the ‘Green Well’ and more about this world. The good law being that the Fae and humans cannot fall in love with one another, and the green well being a well that turns humans into Fae. The adding of more world building started out as a good idea, and makes the reader want to know more about the world, the author didn’t execute it very well. In the instance with the green well, we see our main character Isobel being told that she was sitting next to the green well and she started freaking out. And there were a few hints as to why she freaked out about it, which some people may get but for the majority may not. We wasn’t told about the truth of the Green Well until much later in the book, And to me didn’t feel very well written.
This was constant throughout the book, with various things happening but no explanation to the reader who is new to this world and doesn’t know what about certain things that may be common in the AEOR world.
Next, is the characters of Isobel and Rook. Well, they haven’t won any favourite character awards from me and won’t be in the future. I found them to be very flat, and very two dimensional. To me, Isobel could’ve been a very great, complex character. There were instances with her feelings towards her siblings and her family, and the way she felt for her Craft that had potential to be something great and powerful throughout the book. Though I’m guessing to the length of the novel (it’s only 297 pages) we couldn’t have more of a heartfelt backstory to Isobel, which as a reader could’ve made us feel more strongly for Isobel as a character, but also her feelings towards her family. Isobel went from someone who paints art and has some family, to meeting a royal Prince and then kind of falling instantly in love and seeing her travelling a lot where we didn’t see her develop as a character during her adventure. Again, I think if that the book was longer then we could’ve seen a lot more from the characters in this world.
The last thing I didn’t like about this novel was the romance. As I mentioned in the last paragraph, Isobel basically fell instantly in love, and it felt fake and not fleshed out to me. The fact that it wasn’t fully fleshed out to me bothered me a lot whilst reading because the romance is a big part of this book, and it wasn’t even done well in any sense. I didn’t get the feelings of Isobel and Rook falling in love, or that they were well matched or good for one another. And I really enjoy reading about characters that have good chemistry with one another and I can see the process of them falling for one another and it done well. Maybe if there was more to the development of this romance then it would be more interesting and gripping to read.
So for the most part, this book didn’t grip me and I just needed to know whether it got better as I read on. It didn’t really.
One thing I loved about this book was the language. Margaret Roberson writes so beautifully. A book that is set in the POV of a human talking and thinking in a Fae dominated world, and the language of the book reflected it well. Roberson writing was quite strange and more formal for me to get into but it really reminded me of how the Fae would speak in various fictional worlds and I absolutely enjoyed it. If Margaret Rogerson writes another book featuring Fae and the language like the one she used in this novel, then I’ll be more happy to try it out and see how her book writing has changed and whether we get more fully developed worlds, characters and more.
So whilst this book has some good points, I felt that there was a lot more to improve but as this was Margaret Rogersons debut novel, I’m impressed with how well it is. I feel with time, she’ll become better and better, and I love to see how she improves with each book.
GazerofBooks 