The Golden Book of Faerie

Sometimes you just need to get lost in am adventure book: a quest book where the heroines are excited, not compelled, to complete their journeys. The Hunter's Moon is such an adventure book, a story deeply woven with Irish myth.

The writing in this book, most often the descriptions of landscape and magic, is fantastically beautiful, singular and inimitable. The incorporation of Faerie and the Irish landscape is wonderful and rich. Yet the plot feels forced, with the characters responding to the bend of the author's will rather than the natural progression of story. Melling tried to make me care about the characters and their bonds together, but there were just too many people, too few pages, and too much cringeworthy dialogue in this book for that to happen. The romances were not realistic or believable or even particularly romantic, and the ending was an unsurprising copout.

This book is definitely worth reading, especially for fans of Irish folklore, quest stories, and lovely descriptive writing, but it is not a well-rounded book.

There was next to nothing for back story and the writing style was too immature for me. It didn't help that the characters were so shallow and the plot made no sense to me. People Gwen barely knew suddenly became instant friends and the whole bit about being caught in time? Where the did that even come from? How is that part of faerie and why is it suddenly a power that for some reason monks know about? Oy vey this book was a mess to read.

This was a strange book. I liked it, but I didn't like it. It's so hard to explain. The story is fabulous, the setting is wondrous, but something was missing.

Oh! I know what is was, it was the characters!

There was close to no character development. You were just expected to understand why two cousins who live an ocean away from each other and are so different are so close. You actually just assume they are so different, you don't really know because Fin (I do that because her name was too long and impossible to pronounce) was barely in the story. Gwen is wishy washy and apparently, very quick to fall in love? I'm not even sure what happened there.

I read somewhere that this book was updated and re-released. Maybe something got lost in the updating? It was so strange because the story was so good, but the writing itself, the way the story was written was awful!