UF Review & Contest: FEAST by Merrie Destefano

Merrie Destefano’s Afterlife was a rough-and-tumble sci-fi noirish mystery, but put that out of your head, because Feast is not a sequel. It’s a lyrical rural fantasy with an almost fairy tale quality to it. Let’s take a look!
 
THE OFFICIAL BLURB: Halloween is a bad time to return to the woods... Madeline MacFaddin ("Mad Mac" to fans of her bestselling magical stories) spent blissful childhood summers in Ticonderoga Falls. And this is where she wants to be now that her adult life is falling apart. The dense surrounding forest holds many memories, some joyous, some tantalizingly only half-remembered. And she's always believed there was something living in these wooded hills. But Maddie doesn't remember the dark parts—and knows nothing of the mountain legend that holds the area's terrified residents captive. She has no recollection of Ash, the strange and magnificent creature who once saved her life as a child, even though it is the destiny of his kind to prey upon humanity. And soon it will be the harvest . . . the time to feast. Once again Maddie's dreams—and her soul—are in grave danger. But magic runs deep during harvest. Even a spinner of enchanted tales has wondrous powers of her own.

MY THOUGHTS: As I said earlier, Feast (which seems to be starting a new Harvest of Dreams series) has a mystical, almost fairy tale quality about it as we follow Ash and Maddie through a spiral of events that ultimately gets her caught up in the mythical Wild Hunt come to rural Ticonderoga Falls. There’s a lovely, ethereal quality to the storytelling that keeps you moving through the book as Destefano slowly unfolds the mystery of what Ash and his not-so-nice family members are (but I won’t tell you since that’s a major mystery of the book), and how Maddie, just off a bad divorce and trying to get her emotional feet under her again, fits in, as well as her young son.

            Just a warning for point-of-view purists. The style in which this book is written can be a little intimidating, with the narrative shifting between several characters’ viewpoints and each written in first-person. It doesn’t make the story hard to follow, but it makes it hard—at last in the first third of the book—to keep the characters straight.

           

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