An Enchantment of Ravens: A Review

The main plot of the book is a girl named Isobel who paints self portraits for the Fae folk. The whole shtick is that the Fae cannot make human craft (think cooking, painting, drawing, just anything that has a bit of creativity behind it) so they go and buy craft in exchange for spells. Isobel is the best painter in the village so her customers are usually the higher up Fae, and this book starts off with her getting one of the most important Fae (and love interest), the autumn prince named Rook. Plot stuff starts to actually happen now with Isobel seeing that Rook actually has, feelings! So somehow Isobel paints him to look like he has feelings (I don’t really know), this causes Rook to get mad because he can't let people know he has feelings and he takes her back to his court to be tried for her crimes. We get a bit of traveling and tension (even though they’ve only known each other for about a week), they get there and Rook realizes that he can’t kill the love of his life. So they create a lie and it’s completely fine but oh wait we actually need more of a conflict, so turns out the fae and humans can’t be together because of reasons. They go and fight the big bad Fae lord and win! And they live happily ever after with her weird goat turned children.

One of my favorite and least favorite parts of the book, the magic system! One of the things that first drew me to the book was the magic, the fact that she changed the Fae lore from what many people do to twisting the lore into something that I’ve never seen before was really great. Don’t get me wrong, most of the fae lore is the same like the seasonal courts, they can control you if they have your name, and are just general tricksters. But that is where the good parts of the magic system end. We now get into the really weird and complicated rules that the book calls the Good Law. Which basically prevents humans and Fae from falling in love lest the fae and human die, but they don’t have to unless the human drinks from the Green well. What is the green well you ask, it’s this book's mcguffin! All it does is make the human fae which means that if you break the Good law you have the choice of dying or losing your humanity forever. Although the criteria to break the law is vague and you could easily get past them and be fine, we need some sort of conflict. That’s basically all I can say about the magic system, there is a bit more but it’s really vague and hard to describe. So on to the next one.

Next my favorite part of any book, the love story! And if I had to describe this book's love story in one word it would be bland. It’s a pretty standard love story, they start liking each other after getting to know them, they get mad at each other, and then they finally admit their feelings because they can’t keep away from them any longer. It doesn’t really do anything I haven’t seen before, and I didn’t really like the fact that they only knew each other for like an hour and they were already in love. One reader on Goodreads said “it did tread on some of my biggest pet peeves - over-the-top instalove.” Which I agree, having huge love confessions within a week of meeting each other is a bit much. The story does have a few cute moments but they’re mostly overshadowed by the fact that they barely know each other. I can’t really say much else about this book that hasn’t been said about many other love stories like this, so that will be all from me.