Spells: A New Kind Of Faerie Tale - Aprilynne Pike

At Christmas I was lucky enough to receive a whole pile of books as presents, though due to my Children getting ill over the festive season, just stuck said books in my bookcase and thought no more about them.

I managed to get around to these books in the new year, with this book practically throwing itself at me, though I think this was more due to the colour of the colour than anything else!

The book in question is - “Spells, a new kind of faerie tale by Aprilynne Pike”.

The story starts with a young girl called Laurel, standing in front of her old house, a cabin in front of a large forest.

She is panicking about seeing a boy again that she has been avoiding for months, this in part due to the fact she maybe in love with the boy, but is also in love with her boyfriend David, sounds straight forward…..nope, because as the book title suggests this is far from being easy!

Laurel discovered last year that she is in fact a faerie, one that for some reason was placed with a human couple when she was seven years old, but as she had her memory altered at that time, she has no recollection of her years before that age.

She has now reached the age of education (faerie years anyway) and has been summoned to attend the academy in Avalon ( a mystical faerie world accessible through a heavily guarded tree), for her education, she is far behind the faeries her own age due to her living in the human realm, but as she is a “fall” faerie (she blooms in the fall!), she is a quite rare faerie, and they are needed to help produce medicines for all the other faerie population, a task that the lesser “spring” faeries cannot achieve.

On top of this she is still having flash backs to a run in with a particularly vicious troll named Barnes, and though she has once drove him away, she is sure he will return to finish the task at hand.

Will she be able to defend herself against more powerful beings?

This book was pretty much as I had expected before reading it, and even though this really isn’t what I would consider my sort of book, I still quite enjoyed it!

The story pretty much revolves around the stop start romance between Laurel and faerie guard Tamani, with it feeling very much like a teenage angst type story, interspersed with faeries, though it does give it another depth when comparing the so-called perfection of Avalon with Laurels normal human world and all that goes with it.

There is very little violence, no bad language or sexual content, so have decided that I have no problems with my daughter borrowing this after this review is finished! (She has read the Twilight series and found that enjoyable, and this book is a slightly more insipid version of that!).

The story is told from the third person perspective, so much of how Laurel feels about her current situation is lost in translation, which I feel would have added a little something extra to the story, also the fact this is actually the second book in this series (the first being wings), meant that I needed all the characters being re-explained, though with how the story is told this was sufficiently done without to much interruption to the flow of the book.

This to me is a children’s book wrapped up for an adults enjoyment, the same way many of the newer vampire books have been, never the less this was an enjoyable, if somewhat light read.

Price wise this can be purchased for around the £4.00 mark on www.amazon.co.uk, or if you have a “books workshop” nearby you, can be purchased as part of a “3 for £5.00” deal.

Thanks for reading x

ISBN 978-0-00-731437-9