Red-Haired Ash Reads

After reading the Monstrous series I knew I wanted to read more of Mayne’s books. Well I put this off for a bit because I am not really a fan of fae stories because I find the fae to be a bit boring because they are just beautiful and cruel magical humans. I find a lot of the stories to be a bit boring in the fantasy/paranormal department so I put this off because of that fear. Well I was right in that because this is the predictable cruel beautiful fae unseelie queen who wants to gain more power and use Ash to do that. 

Ash is a 21 year old man who has returned from college and finds himself being kidnapped by the fae, who he used to see and play with when he was a child. They claim he is half-fae and that he needs to “shed his mortal skin”, a phrase that is repeated so much in this book that it got annoying before I was even halfway through. Ash’s story was slow and nothing really happened until the very end. He spends the majority of his time in a cottage reading, gardening, and playing with his animal friends. It was a bit boring at times and I ended up skimming at times because it just felt so repetitive. 

Ash and Lonen’s relationship was fine. There wasn’t a lot of build up to it outside of a few tense conversations before they had sex that were emotionless on Lonen’s part. While I didn’t mind their relationship, I never really connected to Lonen because he was emotionless the majority of the time due to his upbringing of not showing emotions. I really think this book needed to be dual POV to really have the relationship be more impactful but we do finally see emotion from him at the end, even if it was a bit too late. 

Overall, this was a very slow introduction to this world and characters. I enjoyed it but I also struggled with the pacing of it. While it does end on a cliffhanger I am not sure if I am going to be continuing this series because I don’t know if the world and characters really worked for me but I might change my mind after a few days or weeks. 

CW: death of parents in car accident; grief; kidnapping; threat of torture and being eaten; 

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