Thumbs up for Lava Red, Feather Blue by Molly Ringle. Romantic fantasy.
This book was billed as “Sleeping Beauty, but make it gay,” which meant that I kept putting off reading it because I almost always hate fairytale retellings. I shouldn’t have worried. Yes, Prince Larkin is awakened after two hundred years of magical sleep, but that’s just where this book starts. Lava Red isn’t a fairytale (thank God) – it’s an adventure lush with specific, well-thought-out detail, and I can almost believe that there’s an island in the Pacific on which humans and fae live in not-exactly-harmony. Spoiler: things go wrong. The story cracks along, and I read this book in one sitting. My one complaint is that I’d have liked another sixty or seventy pages—seriously; the snappy pacing of the plot makes sense internally, but it doesn’t give the love story time to develop. (But then, I’m a 600-pages-then-kiss kind of writer.) Looking for an escapist, but well-thought-out standalone fantasy?—here you go.
Larkin’s legs felt weak, his mouth dry, his body neglected. Every time he moved, furthermore, a seam ripped somewhere in his clothing. He leaned against the wall and examined his decaying sleeve. When he lifted his foot, he found his shoe falling apart into moldering scraps—shoes of the finest deerskin, sturdily made and expertly stitched when he had put them on in 1799. He ran a hand over his face, felt sweat and grime, and grimaced at the dirt that came off on his fingers.
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