Book Review: Ambrosia

Title: Ambrosia
Author: C.N. Crawford
Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Fiction

What it’s about: Ava finds herself in a forest, surrounded by greenery, and touches her own horns in horror. She is attacked by a spider, and runs away until she finds Torin, who has followed her through the portal. Ava is an Unseelie, considered to be the demons amongst the Fae, while Torin is the king of the Seelie. He should kill her because her people have killed his family and put a curse on him and his sister, but he cannot find it in him to kill her because he’s come to care for her.

Together, they escape their pursuers and hide in an abandoned house. They learn that in order to get back to the land of the Seelies, they have to visit a Crone, who has the answers on how to get back and what to do in order to get Torin’s powers back, since his magic had cracked the kings throne. They make it all the way to the mountains and into the Temple belonging to the Crone, when they are captured but the Unseelie, specifically a healer who works for the Queen.

Both Torin and Ava are imprisoned, but they manage to break out, only to be captured again. Torin had used the Sword of Whispers to get to her. They are brought into the Queen and this time she has Torin killed, while Ava is thrown into the dungeons.  Ava starts to use her magic–which is accessing the life force of plants, and in her escape again, she brings down part of the the tree that the queen lives in. She gets finds Torin again, and then the Queen reveals the truth–Ava is her daughter, Isavell. She had gone to meet with the Seelie King and Queen to negotiate, when they were threatened, and the Unseelie Queen couldn’t get to her daughter, whom she entrusted into the care of a nurse provided by the Seelies. Ava gets dropped off the tower, and as promised by her mother, as she falls, she sprouts wings. She escapes with Torin, carrying him to safety, and Torin goes back to his land, where he finds Shalini, his sister Orla, and Aeron in cages outside of the castle walls. He gets them out to safety, but is captured by the reigning Queen, Moira.

While they were in the Unseelie land, Moira had brought the Crone from the Seelie lands to court. The Crone showed a twisted version of what happened to Torin and that he was colluding with the enemies. Moira designated herself the queen after this, but she let the people of the Seelie kingdom suffer by refusing to sit on the throne, and as such starving them. Shalini questions all of this internally and doesn’t speak up as it becomes apparent that doing so would put her at risk. Moira captures Shalini, Aeron and Orla using the Sinach, a fearsome dragon and stringing them up into the cage on the side of the castle to make an example of them.

When Moira captures Torin upon his return, she has him tied up to a post, and surrounds it with water. Then she gets the Sinach to boil it, which becomes increasingly uncomfortable for Torin without his winter magic. Ava returns to the Seelie lands after going to the human lands and realizing that Shalini has not returned. She fixes up the throne, giving Torin back his powers. He uses them to cool off the water, snap his ties, and swim towards Moira and the Sinach. When he reaches them, he begins to battle them–his ice against their fire, but then they fly off towards a figure that he recognizes as Ava because she is the only fae shaped individual with wings. She is flying towards him. Knowing that her own magic is useless against fire, Ava hides in the trees and uses the trees to trap the dragon. She then holds Moira off just until Torin arrives and they fight and kill both Moira and the Dragon. They also kill the Crone, who had been the true instigator and was trying to bring the downfall of the kingdom, once they’ve protected the kingdom from a tsunami that the Crone has created. 

Torin tries to keep her away, but Ava tells him that the curse is broken–it was placed by her mother, because she had wanted a Dark Cromm Queen on the throne. Further, Ava realized that her mother had put the two of them through trials in order to see if Torin cared for her enough to sacrifice himself for her and make her the Queen of Faerie. But it was also a trial for Ava because love makes the Cromm stronger–they will do anything to protect those they love.

Ava opens up a bar in the castle named Chloe, after her human mom, and invites everyone, in the hopes that people will accept her. Shalini and Aeron show up, though Shalini is not too keen on being out and about after what had happened with Moira, but she tells Ava that the bar is amazing.

My Thoughts: This book was boring–more so than the first one. I would think that the romance in this one would pick up and heat up, but was sadly disappointed as they acted like they were friends rather than people who loved each other. On top of that, the curse and what the Unseelie Queen did is still not clear–what exactly lead up to it and who created that situation. Between the two books I was able to figure out that the Unseelie Queen and the Seelie Couple met up, and there was an animal head brought on a plate, which is basically a cultural no-no in their world, implying a threat, and the daughter was in the care of a nursemaid (no idea what happened to her) specifically separated from her mother by the Seelie couple (for what reason? still unclear) and then there was a huge massacre. As you can see this story and the moments leading up to the main reason why there is a curse that causes Torin to kill those he loves (did the Unseelie Queen think that Ava and Torin were meant to love each other so she cursed him to kill anyone who is not Ava?) is unanswered, and this makes it a very weak ruse in the book in my opinion as to give the backstories of these and how that impact them–it doesn’t really move the story forward in anyway. There’s really nothing in these two books where the story moves forward beyond he said, she said, they did, they didn’t do. There’s no emotional connection, no banter, and very dry writing.