Luella already has a mission in life.
As a talented healer, she dedicates her time to saving the people from her town. It’s a close community – one she feels a deep connection with. That is why when the Elf King comes to whisk her away as his bride, her entire world falls apart.
She never wanted to be a queen.
She wants to help people from her motherland – not the elves, who are ready to drain her of her power until there is nothing left. Taking more than she is willing to give.
Titled the Human Queen in a foreign land, she will have to face her future and learn about the past – all the while doing her best to remain alive in the cruel present.
For no queen or king is without enemies.
***
A Deal with the Elf King is not my first contact with a book written by Elise Kova. A couple years back, I’ve head the pleasure of reading her Air Awakens series (you can find my reviews of book one and two on my blog), and each and every single book stole my heart from the very first page.
There have been new releases since then but I’ve strayed away from Elise Kova’s works for a while. So when one day I scrolled upon an Instagram post advertising the release of her newest series, I thought, why not?
I love stories unraveling around Elves or the Fae. The mystical worlds they inhabit share some common characteristics, but each author has a different approach toward their traditions, their magic, their character.
The approach A Deal with the Elf King presents us with was one of the duller ones I’ve encountered.
It started off well. The first few chapters sucked me in one night and the next day, I woke up excited to get back to reading. There was this feeling of duty forcing Luella to leave her land, the promise of a love-hate relationship hanging in the air, a struggle between the right and the wrong – between what the heroine wishes to do and what needs to be done.
But as soon as the plot started unraveling, it became… flat. I didn’t feel the depth of the connection unfolding between Luella and Eldas. It was that type of a book relationship where they go straight from hating each other to rolling in between the sheets, deeply in love. No in-between.
As the romantic aspect is not the only important element of the plot, I sought solace in other things. However, the main character only had one thing she was fond of doing – healing. It’s okay to give a character a hobby, but not to the point it becomes all they can talk about.
Other characters were cruel, just for the sake of being cruel. They were either black or white and while there was some attempt at explaining why the bad guys were bad and the good ones were good, it just lacks the depth I’d expected after Air Awakens.
Luella herself doesn’t top my list of favourite heroines, either. I’m still not sure if she was supposed to be gentle or sassy because she was both – and not always in a balanced, natural way. I had a feeling she was supposed to be good-hearted without being weak, but her random outbursts of fierceness seemed forced and inconsistent with her personality to me.
She just seemed to go with the flow – Luella is forced to become the Human Queen, Luella tries to be brave and escapes the castle even though she shouldn’t, Luella ends up in a wrong place at a wrong time and sees something she shouldn’t, Luella gets kidnapped and then rescued by King Eldas who magically seems to always know where she is and what she’s doing.
She had a few initiatives of her own, but still, the plot of the book came dangerously close to a typical fantasy-romance cliché – something I never would have expected from a book written by one of my favourite authors.
It might just be because my expectations were too high. If the book was written by someone else, I might have not minded it. It was enjoyable at times and I did finish it, so it wasn’t all bad. It’s just that – after reading the Air Awakens series, I admired Elise Kova’s ability to implement unordinary solutions. She steered right off the canon – her characters were vivid, her plot fascinating, and her writing brave. She had the courage to go against all your expectations and break your heart by introducing a plot twist you might or might not have expected – but even if you did, you’d think: “no, she’s not going to do that, that would be too cruel”.
I missed that here. Everything seemed to work out too perfectly, the characters lacked their depth, some issues remained unsolved.
I’m a verified masochist. I actually enjoy cliff-angers and bad endings more than I do the happily-ever-afters (although I’m not saying all books should end like that to be good, it’s just my peculiar personal preference). If a book doesn’t hurt just a little, it wasn’t really worth my while. Reading is an escape to me – it’s supposed to take me away from reality, make me feel things, whether it’s anger or devastation or joy. This one was pretty neutral.
Maybe that was the author’s intention. Maybe she’d wanted to write something different, something less intense, just a little distraction for those who are looking for something light to read on the train without needing to fear they won’t be able to focus once they arrive at work.
The book wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t good enough to fit into the expectations I have of Elise Kova’s writing. She still remains one of my favourite fantasy authors and I wholeheartedly recommend her other books. This one only makes me appreciate the rest of her works more.
A Deal with the Elf King, despite my love for Elves and Elise Kova’s writing, won’t make it to my best-reads of 2020 list.
bookofeel 