My first book for the Twisted Fairy Tale Challenge. I picked this mostly because it was a take off on Midsummer Night’s Dream: the main character, Anita/Tania, is the seventh daughter of Faerie King Oberon and Queen Titania. But that’s where the similarities end.

The basic plot is that on her 16th birthday, Anita is pulled back into the Faerie Realm (by the man who was once engaged to her as Tania) where she discovers that she’s been missing for 500 years. Everyone is overjoyed to see her, and she must set about figuring out what all this means, as well as coming to terms with her power, to straddle the Mortal and Faerie worlds.

As a stand-alone book, this wasn’t very good. Anita spends half of the book denying that she’s the fairy princess Tania, and then when she does try to accept and believe in it, she spends time trying to figure out whom to believe and wanting to get back to the Mortal World. It isn’t until the last 50 pages that the book gets exciting, where action takes over for exposition.

But as a first book in a series (which it is, the second being The Lost Queen and the third, The Sorcerer King), it serves it’s purpose extremely well. It sets up Tania as a seemingly flighty girl, but also one who knows her own mind, and who can use the experience of the Mortal World to her advantage. The romance isn’t very interesting, but since Tania spent half the book being angry at her “true” love, perhaps it will be stronger in the later books. But there’s intrigue, betrayal, and confusion, and finally revelation and an even bigger quest to fulfill. It ends with the promise of more adventure, more danger, more romance. Which is good, because the one thing this book did was leave me wanting to find out the rest of the story.