There is not a lot that I love more than a good ole spooky, sentient forest in a fantasy setting. There’s just something magnetic about the forest and its many shadows, no matter the role it ends up playing in the story it exists in. Edgewood relies on the forest, centers itself around it, and so then you’d fully expect I’d love it, right? Well, so did I.

There are honestly a lot of interesting ideas at the core of this book, and so much I’ve loved in other stories, and yet the execution of them in this book just didn’t work for me at all. I honestly feel like this is the most boring way this story could have been written, and it honestly breaks my heart to say that! I adored The Last Namsara, and it’s sequels, and had such high hopes going into this one because of it. But Edgewood just doesn’t contain the magic that The Last Namsara did, and while it’s just as reliant on a large amount of stories and lore that build up the story world, it just didn’t relish in it.

I was hooked fast in this book, but yet it stagnated at around 20% in, where the events and revelations seemed to slow down, even as Emeline was exploring a literal magic forest with a diversity of mythical creatures around her. In the end, this is where the book began to lose me, and it never really got me back after it. I continued because I had to, because I had an ARC to review and friends to discuss it with, and even then I needed to borrow an audiobook to get me through the last 50%, because it was just impossible to make myself pick it up again.

In the end, there were so so many things that this story used that I’d seen in other books and loved before, but any enjoyment I got out of these events and tropes came from the remembrances of those other books (namely The Starless Sea and Echo North), not from the actual book itself. In another timeline, I can see myself adoring this book, as it does everything I love from a book, but it just lost me too early on in the story, and the execution of certain events just put me off and kept me from being reabsorbed into the story.

While my love of The Last Namsara will definitely have me coming back for more from this author still, I will be a bit warier going in, due to the letdown that this book unfortunately was.