Well, this was MIND-NUMBINGLY boring. I made it to 41% and couldn’t take it any more.

Lyrical? Sensual? No, not really. The prose isn’t bad, but it’s not what I’d call lovely, either. Feminist? Eh, I guess, in that very, very overdone, healer/witch-in-Medieval-setting way. I saw a few other reviews describe this book as a villain origin story, claiming that Bess was going to go all interesting and dark, but I’m not willing to keep reading in the hopes of that (and the hopes of it being done well and interestingly, at that).

We start in the middle of the Tam Lin ballad: Tam Lin has just been pulled from his horse, and the Seelie Queen, our first-person narrator, insists on telling Janet her (the queen’s) life story in order to make Janet give up Tam Lin. How that’s supposed to work, I don’t know; why the queen doesn’t just kill Janet or steal Tam Lin back (after the whole pulling-him-from-the-horse, holding-him-while-he-shapeshifts challenge) I don’t know. No mention is made of any reasons for the queen not to do either of those things.

The majority of the novel is the queen’s life story. She used to be Bess, a changeling who learned traditional healing from her human mother; not long after said mother dies, her human father kicked her out. Bess ended up living with the shepherd who’s expressed sexual/romantic interest in her, and they’re very happy together for a while. Throughout this, Bess is given reason to suspect that she might not be ‘just’ some changeling, but the changeling daughter of the previous Seelie queen herself – who apparently died in childbirth not very long ago. (Do I hate that childbirth can take out a Seelie queen? Yes. Do we know who has been leading the Seelie court during Bess’ human life? No, no we do not. At least not as of 41% through the book; maybe it’s revealed later.)

This is all broken up occasionally by moments returning us to the Tam Lin story, with Janet asking the queen to just let them go, and the queen (Bess) insisting on telling the story. It feels extremely forced.

Bess’ story just isn’t that interesting. It should be: she should be giving us a faerie perspective on the humanity that surrounds her, but that’s pretty minimal (possibly in part because she doesn’t know much of Faerie herself, having no memories of it). There’s themes of female independence, but I didn’t think it was executed terribly well, and I think the author was trying to go for sensual sex-positivity, but that wasn’t terribly successful either. Bess is mad at the patriarchy, including as it manifests in rich noblewomen, but her temper is all kept on the inside; she very rarely pushes back or makes any waves. Out of nowhere she starts developing magical powers she wasn’t aware of before, and this felt very choppy and hand-wavey to me; she doesn’t question why she has them or why they only appeared now, doesn’t practice with them, and we kept time-skipping over their development – we jumped months and she has new powers she didn’t have in the previous chapter, that kind of thing. She’s possessive of Thomas, her shepherd, and it’s implied that this is something to do with her fae nature and a bargain she and Thomas accidentally struck, but that wasn’t super interesting either. Bess intends to pass through the Veil and go to Faerie, but she keeps waffling on it and finding reasons not to go on the festival days when the Veil is permeable.

You know what would have been interesting? Faerie. Bess politicking and scheming and making allies in order to claim the throne, establish herself as queen. But her practicing as a ‘cunning woman’ in our world was dull as ditchwater, not least because we already know how this is going to go! From what she-as-queen told Janet, we already know that Thomas is going to betray her and leave her. We obviously already know that she does manage to become queen of the Seelie. Why the HELLS does it need to be so drawn out before we get to anything interesting???

So – it’s very likely that the second half is a lot better than the first. You know, once she actually gets to Faerie. But even if that’s so, the set-up of this being a story she’s telling Janet was incredibly clunky and forced, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The prose is nowhere near what I’d call lyrical or sensual. Bess as an individual wasn’t very interesting to me; her human life certainly wasn’t. Maybe the second half of the book is better, but I’ll never know, because I’m not forcing my way through any more of the deeply meh first half.