YA Review & Contest: THE QUICKSILVER FAIRE by Gillian Summers

We’re looking at YA today, to a wonderful world of half-elven, part fae teen Keelie as she negotiates the treacherous world between the elves and the faeries of the High Court. Author Gillian Summers is the pseudonym of the Georgia writing team of Berta Platas and Michelle Roper. The book is The Quicksilver Faire, and it was released June 8 by Flux.

THE OFFICIAL BLURB: At the dazzling Fairy High Court—fraught with enchantments and trickery—Keelie Heartwood discovers that an imbalance in magic has created a colossal rift that can destroy the world. Keelie's mixed blood (elf, human, and fae) makes her powerful, but this sixteen-year-old L.A. girl can't fix things alone. The Grey Mantle elves aren't helping at all, even though bizarre things are happening all around their village.The more Keelie learns about the magical worlds of the Northwoods-where time is unruly, nasty goblins run amok, and an ancient (and handsome) forest god is pursuing her-the more she doesn't know just whom to trust.

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MY THOUGHTS: The second title in the Scions of Shadow Trilogy reads very well as a standalone despite being set in a complex and beautiful world that borrows equally from Tolkien’s tales of Middle Earth and folk mythology.

            It suffers from one thing that bothers me about a lot of YA (I mean really a LOT of YA), which is the idea that a sixteen-year-old is the person upon whose inexperienced shoulders lies the fate of the world. Yeah, yeah. I had a sheltered childhood; I was never called upon to save the entire human race before I was old enough to drive. So it's probably jealousy.

            But once you accept that premise, this is a terrific story that grabs you from page one. As a “mutt,” an elf-human-fae hybrid, Keelie is wry and likeable, and the authors do a great job of weaving the mythology of the Wild Hunt and the forest folk into the story. The Green Man, the legendary god of the forest, makes for a sexy, enigmatic figure. Magic has been leaking into the human world, and the ways humans are incorporating it into their lives makes for fun reading. The authors have created great characters in an at time wild and complex world.

           

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