Rowan Wood Legends (The Lost Clan #2) by Olivia Wildenstein (Review)

     The second installment in The Lost Clans series, Rowan Wood Legends
continues the tale of Cat, a young woman who is half faerie, half hunter. The faeries hate her for her hunter side, and the hunters desipse her for her faerie side, and she just wants be treated like a regular person. After loosing her mom, a best friend and a good chunk of her freedom, she is seesawed between a hunter that is obsessed with her because she looks like his dead wife, and a cocky jerk of a faerie that sees her as less-than because of her hunter side but still overwhelmingly wants her anyway. She wishes her two sides could just learn to live in piece, but with both kinds determined to exterminate each other, it doesn't look very promising.
       Just like the first book in the series, Rowan Wood Legends was okay. The love triangles in the two books are not fantastic, and I struggle to want anyone to succeed. Both also have plots, but they feel like sometimes dull ones. I really feel that these books could have done with some more immediate stakes, something with a time limit that would make the readers be more invested. A lot of the stakes in this book felt pretty nebulous, like they were there, but they might or might not actually end up mattering and there were no clear objectives to get Cat's butt into gear. Like she had MANY scenes of just shopping, eating at dinners and taking trips for fun. Any stakes in the book die in moments like that. It can't be that important if Cat has time to go chill and go clothing shopping during it. Anyway, the writing voice is competent and the universe has a lot of potential, so I give Rowan Wood Legends the rating of THREE AND A HALF STARS OUT OF FIVE!!!

*Advanced Readers Copy Review*

Rose Petal Graves (The Lost Clan #1) by Olivia Wildenstein (Review)

      Rose Petal Graves contains a mixture a native culture, magic and fantasy elements. It's unique approach to the combination of native magic and the fae myths make for a weird universe that made its own rules. Catori is a seemingly regular girl when
her life is thrown upside down by the tragic and unexpected death of her mother. When she goes back to her home town to mourn, she find a surprisingly suspicious situation. She is seeing things no body else seems to be able to see, and she believes her mother didn't die of natural causes, but that someone had their hand in her death. On a mission to unravel the mystery of her death, Catori meets both powerful friends and foes.

      Rose Petal Graves was okay, it had some very interesting mythology and mystery, but it's plot seemed to drag on every once and a while, allowing the reader to get more easily board. There were definitely some interesting character choices in this novel. The fae in the book use powder as the source of most of their magic, their powers of deception primarily, but they can actually run out or loose their powder (therefore loosing their powers), which was strange to read and made the fae less powerful in the mind of the readers. I wasn't really the biggest fan of these renditions of fae, but they were not bad altogether. Catori was a meh character, not terrible, just tolerable. Writing wise the narrative voice of the novel was pretty clean and smooth, which was nice. And although the romance in the novel was wish washy, the romantic leads were interesting on their own rights. All in all, Rose Petal Graves was meh, but could potentially be really enjoyed by a different type of reader, therefore I give it the rating of THREE AND A HALF STARS OUT OF FIVE!!!

*Advanced Readers Copy Review*