This was ...magical! Loved the world and the fae.


Loam's love affair was what brought the stars down for me. The insta love took me about 10 pages back to look for something I might have missed. The last sex scene I simply didn't care for. Same goes for the fact that in the end Loam left with one lover, leaving the other behind. What was the deal with that? I didn't really mind, but it was somewhat puzzling. ( )

Lullaby for a Stolen Child by Anna Mayle (20,907 words) is a dark, brutal fantasy set in a hypnotically beautiful supernatural world. The story works with the familiar Celtic legends of the elves, also known as the Fae, the Fair Folk, and the fairies. It adds a level of sex and violence that might be off-putting to some readers, but which also meshes well with the detached and depraved cruelty that has always existed between the lines of the old legends about the immortal elves. The writing is beautiful and clear. The plot is somewhat slight and the pacing is slowed by the descriptive world building, but I never found my interest dropping, and I admired how all the threads of the story came together in the end.

The story opens upon the classic situation of a human child stolen by the Fae to live in their world. Meanwhile, a Fae changeling takes the place of the stolen child in the human world. The changeling is a Redcap, a solitary Fae who commits murder for fun. He has the ability to shape his features into an illusion of the human he chooses to impersonate. Meanwhile, the stolen human, who is named Loam, grows up in the Fae world, forced to fight in gladiatorial combat for the amusement of his captors. One of the highborn Fae named Tache is an assassin dedicated to hunting and killing the same human even through the human’s reincarnated lives. However, he grows too obsessed with Loam to continue his hunt, even as the Redcap falls for Tache. The two Fae males and the human Loam find their destinies intertwined in dangerous and unexpected ways.

Val for AReCafe ( )