[(The Girl Who Never Was)] [ By (author) Skylar Dorset ] [June, 2014] Paperback – 3 Jun 2014

Excellent book. Need to read this to understand the others. Great series.

Good

great

Look at that blurb. Are you kidding me? Our heroine finds out at age seventeen that she's a fairy princess marked for death by her fairy queen Mother? That she and some stud-muffin have to save both the fairy world and the human world? How did I even end up holding this book in my hands?Well, guess what? Our heroine, Selkie, is an engaging, spirited pistol. All of the characters are fully realized and compelling. The plot screams along; the action is intense; the romantic angle is handled with grace and discretion, and the author's descriptive powers approach the sublime. Please excuse me for being such a superior snot.The action starts in Boston, and Beacon Hill is as recognizable as a Boston accent at Fenway Park. The slow dawning of Selkie's realization that her history is strange and magical is a model of how to slowly build suspense and tension. Everything begins to be shadowed by menace and portent, and graceful little throwaway observations and bits of business circle back to sustain the inevitability of the fairy connection.And this is a fairy world based much more in the modern matter-of-fact world of urban fantasy than in Victorian lala land. This is a fairy land of marvel and magic but also of cruelty and terror. This is a fairyland you can sink your teeth into. It is enriched and fleshed out by a wide variety of characters, and even passing characters are developed with wit and humor.Despite the action/menace underpinnings of the story there is a lot of humor here, both in the form of dialogue and in the narrator's sly wit. While the author is irony free and never mocks her own story, there is an undercurrent here that suggests we are all in on this fairy business, and isn't it fun.So, much, much more than I expected and much more entertaining and satisfying. A very happy find.Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.

Selkie doesn’t live a conventional life. She has no idea who her mother is, her father is in a psychiatric ward, and she lives with her two aunts who refuse to answer Seklie’s questions about her mother. Then her seventeenth birthday comes around and she starts to get some answers to all her questions and finds out she is half faerie, half ogre, and she’s part of a prophecy to bring down the Seelie and Unseelie courts.I mostly liked Selkie throughout The Girl Who Never Was. At first I thought she was going to be a bit of a pushover when it came to her aunts and other people telling her what to do but this wasn’t the case. Selkie kept on asking questions and her reluctance to accept silence for an answer made her seem real. However, she could be incredibly naive at times. I honestly couldn’t believe that she thought everything would magically end up okay and she didn’t seem to understand that her life was in danger.The pacing worked really well for this book because while it wasn’t super fast, it was steady. It doesn’t take too long for everything to kick off and there weren’t any points where I thought the plot dragged, although part of that is because The Girl Who Never Was isn’t very long. Despite the shortish length there are a lot of characters introduced. Aside from Selkie there is Ben, a faerie boy who is protecting her; her two ogre aunts who I actually ended up liking, even if they were very protective of Selkie (who can blame them though); and a ton of other people. There isn’t a ton of development on any of them aside from Selkie so I’m hoping we’ll see that in book two.There is also romance in The Girl Who Never Was (score!) and I really enjoyed it. The romance is definitely not the focus because Selkie and the love interest (I’m not telling who but you can probably guess) meet a long time before the book start and she’s already in love with The Boy before the book starts. This means there’s no insta-love and her love for The Boy felt genuine.The book ends on a bit of a cliff-hanger but I didn’t mind in this case. Hopefully in the sequel there will be more development of Selkie and the other characters and there will be more elaboration on the prophecy. Overall I enjoyed The Girl Who Never Was more than I had expected and will be reading the sequel soon!Young Adult3.5 stars