Review: Fable

Fable by Adrienne Young
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the perfect example of a 3-star book. It's also a book that mirrors my thoughts on the only other book by this author that I've read: "Sky in the Deep".

The plotline? Awesome. As someone who isn't usually a fan of sea-fairing tales, I found the plot to be really fun in this book. It reminded me of "Seafire", a book series I've really enjoyed despite my previous distaste for pirate-y books.

The idea of Fable being cast out by her father and spending her entire life trying to find him just to prove her worth... beautiful. Love it. Genuinely an interesting premise and storyline. There's a slight element of magic laced throughout the plot, too, that involves gemstones that intrigued me. It seemed like a really cool, subtle take on the "chosen one" trope.

If you know me, though, you know that I'm usually not reading a book for the plot...but instead, for the characters. This is where I was disappointed with this novel. I could not bring myself to take interest in any of these characters. Fable was by far my favorite, and even at that, I didn't have much attachment to her. There were very few scenes where readers got to learn about characters that weren't chunks of dialogue or flashbacks narrated my modern-day characters. It was a LOT of telling and virtually NO showing.

There was no time given to form a relationship between the readers and the characters, and for that reason, I couldn't bring myself to care all that much. Well-written romantic scenes where characters reveal deep dark secrets to one another? Tears???? I usually gobble that shit up. With this book, though, I felt little-to-nothing.

Overall, I feel the same way about "Fable" as I did with "Sky in the Deep": the plotline and the writing is wonderful, but the characters aren't fleshed out enough to make me care about them. I don't know if I'm going to be reading book 2 or not, but, if I do, I hope I'll find some more attachment with the crew of the Marigold than I did in book 1.

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