Obres de Kylie Fennell
Beginnings (The Kyprian Prophecy) 2 exemplars
Beginnings : The Kyprian Prophecy – An Origins Novella (The Kyprian Prophecy – An Epic Fantasy Adventure… (2021) 1 exemplars
The Air King's Return: The Kyprian Prophecy Book 3 (The Kyprian Prophecy – An Epic Fantasy Adventure Series) 1 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
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Membres
Ressenyes
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 10
- Membres
- 15
- Popularitat
- #708,120
- Valoració
- 3.7
- Ressenyes
- 3
- ISBN
- 2
Content warnings:
The Charmed by Kylie Fennell is set in 1851 the year of The Great Exhibition, the infamous Crystal Palace so named by the glass building designed by Joseph Paxton. Organised by Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert and Henry Cole, The Great Exhibition was an international exhibition that housed exhibits from all over the world. The Crystal Palace is a place of wonder, and it is everything that Lady Alice Hyde could ever dream of, filled with inventions and offers her access to a world that will be closed to her soon.
She’s engaged to be married, and her dreams of travelling to the countries exhibited in The Great Exhibition are disappearing before her eyes. Little does Alice expect to have her world turned upside down while visiting The Great Exhibition. Witnessing the murder of a woman she knows, Alice is drawn into the world of the mysterious fae as she works with Cyan Symond, the Exhibition’s caretaker, to find the culprit. As Alice soon learns, there’s much more going on, and she’s right in the middle of it.
I wanted to like The Charmed, however, there were so many issues that I couldn’t ignore. Fennell’s world-building was interesting at times, and for me personally, the setting of The Great Exhibition was a selling point as it’s my hometown’s local history. Unfortunately, the interesting points were let down by stereotypical characters, weak plot points and huge over-reaching in the world-building.
Let’s start with the characters. Alice is the stereotypical clever and nosey female Victorian character who infuriates the male character, and ultimately they fall for each other. That trope doesn’t bother me so much. What did bother me was that as soon as they slept together, she turned into a completely different person who was fawning over him every second to the point where she couldn’t even finish a sentence. If this was one of those books where fae had a natural sexual attraction, pheromones or anything to explain such a reaction, then fair enough. However, there was nothing to explain this sudden change.
The other characters in the book can all be fixed to a trope. There wasn’t an original character at all in The Charmed, and the big reveals of the book were also huge tropes. The overall plot felt weak due to this. At the start of the book, there appears to be anxiety representation. Alice’s Uncle, the Viscount, struggles with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive thoughts about germs. Later in the book it is revealed that Fennell has not written a character with anxiety or OCD representation, instead, she has just used mental health as a plot device.
While I found Fennell’s interpretation of fae interesting, she has chosen to mix time travelling with her world-building. On some levels, this works and adds interesting components to the story, but Fennell has over-reached at times. For example, bringing technology from the future into the Victorian era and completely ignoring the consequences of doing so. She has just thrown time travel into the mix and brushed any actual technicalities about it under the rug. I also kid you not that one of these items was called a “ray gun”.
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