Mark This Book Monday: ARC Review of Stolen Songbird by Danielle L Jensen!!

Happy St Patrick's Day! I hope you will be safely celebrating, even if you are not Irish (as I'm not!). I will be celebrating with my friends later this evening, since we're planning to go out and have a pint or two.

For this week's Mark This Book Monday I'm once again having an ARC review of a book that will count for my 2014 Review Pile Reading Challenge. I'm also still doing the happy dance for being auto approved for Strange Chemistry on NetGalley and I wanna say a big thank you once again!

Stolen Songbird by Danielle L. Jensen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Being auto approved by Strange Chemistry on NetGalley is simply a joy. It seems that whatever I decide to download it's always gonna be a fresh and new take on whatever genre that it is. This is exactly what happened with Stolen Songbird.

I wanted to read it cause the cover caught my attention, and as soon as I read that it was a fantasy novel about trolls, I was sold! I don't know about you, but I don't think I've seen any fantasy story about trolls out there, plenty of faeries and other creatures, but trolls?

And once again, the book didn't disappoint! The only adjustment I had to make was the first image my brain conjures up when the word "troll" is mentioned... Trolls are ugly in most accounts but the image that always pops up for me is the ones from the David the Gnome trolls, and those are rather ugly beasts! And the trolls in this story quite different!

The story starts with Cécile when she's returning home from the town when she had given a small performance of her singing. She's gonna be leaving for the city the next morning to start her singing career with her mother, but halfway to her family's farm, she's kidnapped and taken to the stolen city of Trollus, and sold for her weight in gold to the King to be the bride of the prince of Trollus.

Cécile is a spunky character, she keeps on trying to find a way to escape, she still tries to stand her ground although as a human she is considered an inferior, even if she's married to the prince. She has to find allies and even unlikely friends and ends up forming a truce with the prince, even if at first she isn't really sure what's going on with him. And Cécile discovers that she's so much more than she even knew and she has a power that can help and change things.

Tristan is the very mysterious and confusing prince and heir of Trollus. He was supposed to marry a human to break a curse and free his city, but seems like his plans are quite different. He keeps a very studied façade and is dealing with much more in politics and power struggles than what Cécile knows at first. His attitude towards Cécile is quite awful at first, but little by little they form an alliance that ends up turning into something other.

The plot is quite interesting, full of politics, rebellion, social inequality, magic, trolls, witches and even some hints at the unknown mysterious origin of the trolls and their true nature. Maybe the humans gave them that name, but what are they really?

The development of the romance was full of false starts and deception, and many doubts and misunderstanding between Cécile and Tristan but it ended up progressing nicely from a precarious truce to an unspoken attraction with many doubts to a starcrossed lovers situation.

The ending is sort of a cliffhanger, and it's also quite evil cause they way it leaves the reader waiting to see how things can get fixed and how can Cécile keep her promise... it's gonna be a long wait till the next book for sure! Very well deserved 4 stars!



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