Nettle

Book Title: Nettle

Author: Bex Hogan

Date Started: November 16th 2024

Date Completed: November 17th 2024

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Romance

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

◆ Thank you to NetGalley for this ebook for review ◆

I'm on a bit of a readathon-style mission to review a bunch of NetGalley ARCs before the end of the year, and I'm pleasantly surprised to say it's made finding books like this one really enjoyable. Nettle took a couple of chapters for me to buy into the narration style, but once it got going I found it really fun.

This novel takes all those classic fragments of faerie stories and combines them into an exciting and alluring adventure. It does justice to those elements with the prose heightening everything to their full, magical potential, exploring the human side to being enchanted to dance forever, being tricked into eating faerie food, and finding the loopholes to solve impossible tasks.

While I spotted the twist right from the beginning (it's not particularly subtle), the way the plot threads were tied up was massively satisfying even if you've seen it coming for 200 pages. I would call this a children's book above YA honestly, and I would've adored it as a pre-teen as an introduction to this sub-genre.