Absolutely breathtaking! I literally felt my heart racing at times! Everything in this book drips with premonition, metaphor, or character, there is not a single word wasted. And the pacing is refreshing for high fantasy. With quippy dialogue and short, manageable chapters which shift between viewpoint characters, this story /moves/. And every now and again, when you start to feel like you're reading a war story or a drama, GRR Martin hits hard with a surprise fantasy element. I am so excited for this journey, and understand how this series developed such a huge, loyal following.
#WinterIsComing #FireAndBlood

This book is beautiful, like if The Lightning Thief and Labyrinth had a baby. I love that this book is what a good story should be: inclusive without being ham-fisted. It's a story about learning to accept yourself, learning to trust others, and navigating family, all of which is universal.
PS - I love Whick, they are the BEST, I would read a whole comic about the misadventures of Whick the Golem!

The writing in this book is breathtaking! The metaphors, and the pervasive use of color to evoke emotions, is just dazzling; I can /feel/ this book with all of my senses.
The characters are intriguing. Scarlett and Donatella feel real, and having "Scar" in particular as the imperfect lense through which we see this mystery play out is endearing.
But the plot stumbles a bit in the last 100 pages. It gets a bit campy, a bit disappointing after all the prior enchantments.

Beautifully Gothic, but not enough Mexican. I was a little heartbroken when Chapter 2 revealed the Doyle family to be incestuous British immigrants. I have read the whole foggy, British manor now in desrepair, etc, story before. I was really hoping this story would bring in references to Mexican culture in a fresh way.
That said, this book has its own motifs, its own internal logic, and it beautifully spins that classic, complicated Gothic web: A Doomed Marriage; A Home in Ruin Reflects An Ill Character; A Character Who Lacks Sleep/Healthy Habits Starts to Confuse Reality, Hallucinations and the Supernatural; and The Eroticism of Death. This book was following in gigantic footsteps, and it crushed it. Welcome to the Goth Club.

Short Version: This book is overly ambitious, and fumbles its potential with a word salad of cliches.

Longer Version, Spoilers Below: I both pre-ordered this book and offered to review an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book because I love S. A. Fenech's work and want to support her as an artist. So, I'm sad to have to be honest: This book did not live up to my hopes.

I will start with the positives though; the lead, Everly, is endearing, realistic, and equal parts heartbreaking and heart-warming. Imagine "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", but instead of bright and perky Buffy being the chosen one, it's shy and sullen Tara instead. Everly is empathetic, trusting, and generously kind, all while nursing the wounds of childhood trauma and living with anxiety. She often fails to see the best of herself, or blames herself for others' suffering. Despite that, Everly never fails to try and do right by people, which - in a world full of darkness both moral and supernatural -is a superpower in its own right.

However, every single secondary character exists to remind Everly that she is great. They have different names and physical appearances, but they might as well be interchangeable, since they share the same motivation and temperament. I honestly had a hard time reading this book because my brain would stumble to match a name to a character, and I would have to go back and reread passages, that was how flat they were. A group of friends (or acquaintances) doesn't agree all the time. I expected someone to question Everly from time to time. To ask if she was being irrational, or paranoid, or besotted, or even magically mislead.... Or to take umbrage with her self-deprecation and fear-induced-paralysis; not everyone is patient with empaths. The lack of interpersonal conflict in this book was noticeable and disappointing, it robbed potentially interesting characters of any depth.

Speaking of Everly's anxiety being a source of conflict... Her anxiety manifests, sometimes, in the form of lucid dreams. For years she has dreamt of her crush, Rylan. After one such dream, Everly wakes up in the middle of the night to see the real Rylan fighting a monster in her yard. The ENTIRE conflict of the book stems from this moment: Everly witnesses Rylan receive a severe injury before she wakes up again, to find herself outside but Rylan is missing... The obvious conflict would be if Everly couldn't tell dreams and reality apart, convinced herself that what she saw was a dream, but lives in an uncertain limbo for days before the magical truth bombs start falling. It would be an ongoing source of tension, never knowing if we could trust the viewpoint character, rather like the escalation of a horror movie. INSTEAD, Everly assumes for the first time ever that her super real-feeling dream was in fact reality this time, and now she needs to go on a quest to rescue Rylan's body, wherever it may be. As mentioned before, her friends and allies do not question her, and completely support Everly in poking randomly around town. At no point does Everly, or anyone else, give up the hunt for Rylan's body on the basis that "maybe my dreams are true" is a bad jumping off point for a detective. Seems like any one character should have had a Reality Check moment and questioned whether believing a dream was a sane idea.

And speaking of sanity checks... Everly takes in stride a LOT: the existence of a parallel world full of shapeshifters and monster ooze; her hometown being a hellmouth; monster zombie roadkill; the spooky monster assassin boarding school her crush attends; being covered in rats, repeatedly... This character was dealing with the deaths of her parents and the reconciliation of her trauma under their roof, and /that/ would have been enough of a story. This girl's crush goes mysteriously missing, and in a bizarre, gender-bent Sleeping Beauty sort of way, she's able to communicate with her love in dreams; she saves the day and /that/ would have been enough. There is a monster hunter academy, and /that/ would have been enough. Everything we think of as a gothic monster is actually the /same/ species of monster, and they have interbred with humans, and /that/ would have been enough. But this book tried to do ALL those plots and more, and after awhile too many threads did not make a sweater.

My final criticism is with the technical writing. I highlighted a lot of passages because they were simply awkward to read. As an example, a large, old home is described as looking like a slumped wedding cake. I don't know what comes to other people's minds, but the first wedding cake I think of is the three-tiered kind, with the circular cakes which get smaller and smaller the higher they stack. I have never seen a house that shape. Fine, perhaps my misunderstanding a metaphor is nitpicky. Better example, "The aroma was a mix of dry-dirt stale and warmly pungent." Pungent is an adjective, it describes something else. You can't structure a sentence as "It was a pungent." But with a change of punctuation, this sentence could be made to make sense: "The room had a dry-dirt aroma: stale and warmly pungent." The technical writing in this book needed an editor's eye, to tighten it up and make it smoother to read. But because the grammar was off, or the word choice was odd (Why would you name your evil castle full of racist, homicidal jocks, Darkfrey. DARK. FREY. Why not just call them The Vile Academy for Would-Be Magical Murderers and be done with it!) I spent more time playing Editor than Reader.

What was great about Everly was not enough to save what was lacking with the rest of the book.

This book is a MASTERPIECE!

This book is so much more than "a vampire book". There are many kinds of bloodsuckers out there: People who are demeaning, and sap your strength, leaving you soul-tired. People who prey upon your faith or hospitality, and expect more than you can give. Sharks who swindle money from you. Systemic racism leaving you tired of struggling for equality. /Sexism/ leaving you tired of struggling for equality! The crushing fear that you are not enough. There is so much more to a life than blood in your veins, and so much more that drains a person in a day than physical exertion. This. Author. NAILED IT! What it's like to be a mother, a housewife, a female friend - the fact that we live so much of our lives in our thoughts and feelings, but they are /valid/ and /real/ - this author crushed it.

This book is delightful! It's fast and witty, the characters are genre savvy, it's almost like the show Once Upon a Time but more fun. I love that the characters know the flaws of their fairytales, and strive to redirect the course of fate. I love that this universe is both more modern and more magical than the original fairytale, without being over the top. An absolute must-read for fans of fairytale retellings.

The beautiful mash-up of "Coco" and "Percy Jackson and the Olympians".

Admittedly, this book is plot-heavy, and sometimes too quick. But the book balances its action and adventure with wonderful themes of inclusion throughout. "Labyrinth Lost" scores big points for being an urban fairytale, a love letter to families of color, and a coming of age story for a young girl navigating the LGBTQA spectrum. I wish I had had more non-Western-centric fantasy stories growing up. I wish I had had a hero like Alex to look up to. This book reminds us all that life is a balance of give and take; giving nothing accomplishes nothing, but positivity is contagious. Share light, and light grows, share love and it grows.

I was expecting this book to be space-age sci-fi/fantasy, and was (pleasantly) surprised to discover that it's actually a modern fantasy featuring Hindu mythology. I had to stop a few times while reading, and educate myself on the unfamiliar zodiac and mythical creatures, which I count as a /good/ thing. I loved learning about another's culture, and being exposed to - what for me was - new magic.
A central theme of this book is being separated from one's heritage, and how to navigate first learning your family's culture, and then deciding which pieces to adopt and which to eschew. And more simply, it's a story about how Sheetal, a young adult, has to navigate the complicated range of feelings all teens go through when they discover that their family are all just other, complicated, flawed adults too. Her journey through doubts and discovery was timeless, and moving.
Not to mention, that this book is a winning trifecta of inclusion: Indian mythology, an Indian-American heroine, and LGBTQA supporting characters.
All that said, for all its good parts, the book also has its flaws. One minor minus, I found the book to be /too/ YA; it felt at times like I was watching a CW show. For example, Sheetal might be /more/ upset at any given moment that she has split ends, than that she her father is dying in the hospital. Or more concerned that somebody lied to her, than that they want to harvest her organs.
But a bigger problem I had with this book, is that I didn't feel the conflicts were resolved satisfactorily by the end. One big dilemma for Sheetal is that she must choose: a life on Earth or a life as a star. And... she doesn't. Another central conflict: Sheetal's grandmother is racist and wants political power so that she can pass racist laws... And she gets that power. Sure, there's a bigger message here about "being yourself" doesn't mean having to compromise which cultures you connect to, OR family is complicated and sometimes racist but we still love them... Those themes just don't make for a satisfying /story/ conclusion.
All in all, I still recommend the book. It's a great conversation starter.

A gorgeous fable about the monsters we become when we let anger rule, and the infectious peace we make when we dare to trust others. My heart goes out to anyone who, like Soraya, has suffered abuse, or has had to make themselves small when their feelings are big.
The back of this book is unique: Instead of a glossary of terms, there is more of a bibliography of inspirations. I loved it! I felt like I was sitting down for coffee and a chat with the author, it was so wonderful to see her thought process. Definitely got the Persian Sleeping Beauty vibes she was striving for.
This book gets major stars for being inclusive. Not just for the heroine being LGBTQA, but because the book explores themes of /romantic/ attraction: how a person can be attracted to a personality trait more than a physical trait.
AND this book gets big stars for its sensory descriptions! Having sense of touch become such a priveledged, intimate, even sometimes decadent, form of communication makes the audience /feel/ the story as it unfolds.
I can see how a reader might get upset with the extended metaphors which run throughout. But personally, as someone who also enjoys folk stories, the metaphors felt appropriate, like they were setting a fairytale tone. I can also see how readers might be upset that the author "borrowed" most of the characters from Persian myths, but since Fairytale Retellings are an entire sub-genre, I fully applaud the way they were rewoven in this book.
Fantastic read! Cannot wait to read more from this author :D. <3