Review: A Lady of Embers (Fires of The Fae Series Book 1) by Erin O'Kane

A Lady of Embers by Erin O'Kane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

MFC A Bit Passive For Me

I’d probably give this book 3.5 ⭐️ if I could.

This is the first book in the series and as such ends on a cliffhanger.

I really wanted to like this book and parts of it I did enjoy but the sad thing was I just didn’t like the MFC. She was too beaten down and passive for me to connect with. Annalise is an High Elf who was held captive by the old Elf Queen. Annalise killed her previous captor (I get the feeling this was probably in a previous series and this is a spin-off, but I may be wrong).

Annalise had been a captive for a 100 years and made no friends during that time. Her family were slaughtered when she was enslaved, so when she is finally free all she does is wander the refugee camps. When the camp she is in is attacked by strange beasts she is captured and taken to a strange land and imprisoned again.

I found it very hard to connect to Annalise because it seems that stuff happens to her, rather than her making things happen. There seem to be only two things that she does decide for herself, the first is to help a human who is attacked at the refugee camps and the second is to refuse to submit to her new captor. Everything else is determined by other people’s actions. Whilst I understand that she had limited choices, I felt that she didn’t really choose anything, she just rolled along being pushed and pulled by the tides of fate.

The writing itself was smooth and descriptive. I enjoyed reading about the world in which Annalise found herself with it’s strange creatures and glimpses of the politics that I hope would be enlarged upon in future books. I just wasn’t grabbed by the characters though. I just felt that I saw only the surface of them and not enough happened to make me forget that I didn’t really understand the characters and their motivations until right towards the end of the book, and even then there was still a lot of information missing.

Essentially, I won’t be continuing with the series because I have a TBR list a mile long and if the first book doesn’t grab me I’m not going to take time away from working my way through the list on something that might not improve in future books. I’m sad I didn’t connect with the characters because I know that this author is capable of writing really great books and if I liked the characters I would probably love this series.

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