Dust was not at all what I expected. It was much darker, but still nonetheless very enjoyable. The book starts out pretty happy go lucky in the Pixie's Hollow. Sure the main character, Rosealie doesn't really feel like she fits in with the other Pixies, but she is happy and content where she is and she loves being out in nature. All pixie's love nature, but Rosalie seems particularly in tune with everything around her. We get to know her roommate and some of the other pixie's her own age and when they started talking about finding a pixie mate, I started scoping out the potential guys for Rosalie. The only one that seemed even a little nice was the one that followed her up to her tree house to talk to her. No one else even seemed to take notice of her. But soon after that, Rosalie is taken. Kidnapped and thrown in a dark cave with no food or water. She awakens days later and is taken to a spriggan camp, where she is basically a prisoner, forced to mine pixie dust all day every day until she dies.

The chapters of the books are set out as days, the number of days that she has been a captive. And the whole tone of the book changed. It went from happy, nature loving to very oppressive and sad. The camp seemed awful and the conditions that the pixie's were forced to live and work in were horrible. The spriggans would continually break the pixie's wings so that they couldn't even try to fly away. I was a little worried that this awful place would start to break Rosalie's spirit and she would begin to lose her mind like so many of the other pixie's imprisoned with her. But finally Rosalie makes her big move! And ends up in prison. (I don't feel like I am giving too much away because it took her going to prison for the book to come to life for me.) So much of the camp was dark and oppressive that I gave up any hope that this book would have a romance in it. There was just so much hate and not even one male that I could like.

Once Rosalie is in the prison she goes through a couple of guards. Fineley was beyond awful and then she got assigned Jack, I was worried that he would be even worse. Jack starts to really see what is being done to Rosalie and he doesn't like what he sees. I'm not going to go too much more into the story because I don't want to spoil anything else from this point forwards. But I will say this, Dust took me by surprise multiple times. Each time I thought I had the book figured out, it changed into something else. I really liked that about it. It wasn't your typically ya story by a long shot. The ending set up the next book in the series perfectly, and I feel like we really got to know the characters and the world well. If you are looking for a different kind of Fae story, give Dust a try.