#shavish

Of course, I always have to immediately go off about how much I love a cover for S.J. Sanders. Absolutely banger cover art 24/7. I will say though, this was not my favorite book of one of my favorite authors. I liked the characters for the most part, and maybe it was just a me thing, but there was a point about 20-30 pages from the end where I sighed and thought, "Really? We're gonna go through it some more right now?" That's when I closed the book and took a seriously long break from reading it. Unfortunately, this wasn't like Punished where I got to sit on it for a second and decide that my initial dislike was simply due to a bad mood.

The basis of the story is this black-sheep-of-the-family witch comes across this ancient talisman that warps her into the fae world, where she is suddenly four inches tall and caught in a downpour. Along comes a hive of four pixies, who conditions unbeknownst to Orenda, perform a delightful mating dance that she graciously accepts. Que bedroom shenanigans and then a wild denial of any mating taking place and some seriously broken hearts for the pixies. The rest of it is the pixies both trying to cope with their emotions, convince Orenda to stay, and conceive ways to get her back to her normal life and maybe follow her into that giant lifestyle as well if they can't accomplish the second task.

Prior to Orenda's appearance we have Shavish, the hive leader, who is headstrong, stubborn, and a little volatile. Orel and Gwin are hopeless and resigned to their fate of being mateless guardians, and Dazi has accepted his fate and hidden himself away in his research and scholarly works to keep busy. They are all good characters, there just felt like a lack of depth to the interactions between them and Orenda.

When it comes to Orenda, in my opinion, she felt like a very skin-deep character at times. I did not care for her attitude and also the way she handled some stuff. Obviously, when consuming media, you're not going to fall in love with every main character you're presented with, so this was going to happen at some point, even with one of my favorite authors.

Overall, it's a 224-page read with the most love interests involved that I've read so far. My humble opinion is; it's mid. It has all the fine writing of S.J. Sanders, but the smut felt lacking and the characters and story didn't keep me chomping at the bit to read more like most of her other works do.

Would I read again? No, I could hardly get through it the first time.