Today’s team review is from Noelle. She blogs here https://saylingaway.wordpress.com
Noelle has been reading Fae Or Foe? by C A Deegan
Although this book is listed for YA, I have found many such books are a great ride, so even though I am not into magical ‘stuff,’ I decided to give this a read. I was not disappointed in my choice. This book is indeed magical – a breathtaking adventure of such imagination that I read myself right into the second book in the series.
Jack Crackley is a normal young teenager, who has a lot on his plate – two jobs to help support himself and his mum, school, lumbering twins at his school who think he and his classmates are good punching bags, and a strange disease affecting young children everywhere. One day they are fine, the next they are comatose and resemble very old people.
The adventure begins when Jack is asked to help move a table by a seemingly innocuous elderly gentlemen who lives in a huge old house on his paper route. What Jack finds in the house changes his life forever: he discovers he can see gnomes and other small creatures he can’t identify – a hidden world he never knew about – and most of them mean him harm. Jack escaped with no idea who he really is, but he has fae (fairies, brownies, and other little folk) all around him to help him find out.
Since he was a baby, Jack and his mother have been living under a magic spell (a glamour) designed to shield him from the clutches of the evil side of his family, the Cracklocks (he is actually Jack Cracklock). But his glamour begins to fail, just as his Aunt Agatha and cousin Anastasia and her devil of a son discover where Jack is living and plot to capture him for what end is not clear—but it is evil and designed to end the world of the fae.
His human reality and the magical world of the fae collide and he discovers that monsters are not only make believe.
The book is full of richly drawn characters, and there is humor and whimsy on practically every page. New imaginative, magical devices appear with regularity, and there is steady tension, punctuated by a breathless stretches. Adventure at its highest in a world previously unimagined.
Treat yourself. Read this.
Five stars.
No one would want to kill a Faery, surely?!
Jack Crackley wouldn’t; teenagers don’t believe in such things. There are plenty of other things to worry about; his mum, jobs, school, the local bullies, not to mention some weird disease that’s affecting young children the world over.
However, things are never as they seem. Little eyes watch out for him whilst bigger ones seek him for their own ends.
There’s a hidden world out there, and its inhabitants are in serious danger. Jack is going to have to get to the bottom of it all before it’s too late. And that’s a tall order when you have no idea who you really are…
A fantasy adventure like no other, where worlds collide and the monsters are not only from make believe.
Things are going to get complicated. It’s a good job our brownie knows how to throw a punch!
Rosie Amber 