Quicksilver
Fae & Alchemy #1
Callie Hart
Publisher: Forever
Publication date: June 4, 2024
Genre: Fantasy romance
Rating:
Do not touch the sword. Do not turn the key. Do not open the gate.
In the land of the unforgiving desert, there isn’t much a girl wouldn’t do for a glass of water.
Twenty-four-year-old Saeris Fane is good at keeping secrets. No one knows about the strange powers she possesses, or the fact that she has been picking pockets and stealing from the Undying Queen’s reservoirs for as long as she can remember.
But a secret is like a knot. Sooner or later, it is bound to come undone.
When Saeris comes face-to-face with Death himself, she inadvertently re-opens a gateway between realms and is transported to a land of ice and snow. The Fae have always been the stuff of myth, of legend, of nightmares… but it turns out they’re real, and Saeris has landed herself in the middle of a centuries-long conflict that might just get her killed.
The first of her kind to tread the frozen mountains of Yvelia in over a thousand years, Saeris mistakenly binds herself to Kingfisher, a handsome Fae warrior, who has secrets and nefarious agendas of his own. He will use her Alchemist’s magic to protect his people, no matter what it costs him . . . or her.
Death has a name. It is Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate. His past is murky. His attitude stinks. And he’s the only way Saeris is going to make it home.
My thoughts…
Y’all, I tried. I really did. This book was recommended to me and so many I talked to about it thought it was a really good book. So I was excited to dive in when my local book club chose it for the month. However, I struggled hard with this. At first I thought it was just a slow build, but at the halfway mark and 299 pages in, I realized it was just slow all the way around. I couldn’t connect with the characters or the main story line.
Everything just fell flat for me. The characters were one-dimensional. It was is the author was like “a sassy strong heroine and a broody male counterpart… that is the recipe for success!” Except Saeris was not all that badass, and Kingfisher was just a psychotic aggressive maniac. Their dialog did not illicit any deeper insight as to who these characters are. Usually when you have a mean character who is the love interest, you see fissures in their character, you understand why they operate this way, and you see their outer shell start to thaw. Fisher did not have this. We are told he was “mentally broken” by the quicksilver during his imprisonment, and that is the excuse for him being the way that he is. Which is like a 15yr old boy going through puberty when in fact, homeboy is over ONE THOUSAND years old. One thousand years old and he acts like an aggressive pervert with a short fuse. No thanks
