(by Charlie N. Holmberg)<\/p>\n
This book is the fourth one in the Whimbrel House series and I started reading it because I was on a train and wanted something plot-heavy and engrossing, and I already had it on the Kindle app on my phone. It was definitely the right book at the right moment for me and I delightedly read for hours. That said, I really disliked the resolution of the love triangle subplot: the guy (Owein) is choosing between an arranged marriage with a very rich girl whose family is a big deal in the English magical nobility (Cora) and a not-arranged marriage with a Druid he clearly loves and also clearly has physical chemistry with (Fallon). I think a future book about Owein and Fallon would be much more fun than a future book about Owein and Cora, and also the whole thing about how Owein needs to marry Cora so they can have babies with strong magic is way too eugenics-coded and definitely gives me the ick. But I’ll probably still read the next book in the series, which is expected to come out in 2026: these books are reliably fun reads for me, whatever quibbles I may have. And while I didn’t like the resolution<\/em> of the love triangle, I really liked the buildup of it, especially the scene where Owein and Fallon kiss (“She smelled like the island, like the ocean and iris and green<\/em>, like the woods at dawn and clouds just after a storm.”) Aside from the love triangle, the other main part of this book is the return of a villain who previously seemed to have been defeated: while one might argue that there’s something a bit phoning-it-in about having the same bad guy pop up again<\/em>, that part worked for me: I liked the final battle and the snippets we get of the villain’s experiences in the years between when the last book ended and when this one starts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (by Charlie N. Holmberg) This book is the fourth one in the Whimbrel House series and I started reading it because I was on a train and wanted something plot-heavy and engrossing, and I already had it on the Kindle app on my phone. It was definitely the right book at the right moment for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14076"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14078,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14076\/revisions\/14078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}