Book Review: Fairy Keeper by Amy Bearce (YA Fantasy)

Happy Monday :)

I read quite a few Advanced Reader Copies, due to generous publishers and the wonderful people at Netgalley.com. A lot of these books are from major publishers, such as Tor or Random House, but I also like to mix it up with independent publishers and self-published authors. As anyone who reads this blog will know, I love fantasy , so that is often my go to for self-pubs.

Today I'm featuring Fairy Keeper by Amy Bearce (Curiosity Quills Press 2015), a fantasy adventure aimed at teens.

(This ebook was provided by NetGalley and Curiosity Quills Press in exchange for a fair and honest review)
Here's some of the official blurb from Netgalley.com:

"Almost everyone in the world of Aluvia views the fairy keeper mark as a gift, but not fourteen-year-old Sierra. She hates being a fairy keeper, but the birthmark is right there on the back of her neck. It shows everyone she was born with the natural ability to communicate, attract, and even control the tiny fairies whose nectar is amazingly powerful.

     Fairy nectar can heal people, but it is also a key ingredient in synthesizing Flight, an illegal elixir that produces dreaminess, apathy and hallucinations. She’s forced to care for a whole hive of the bee-like beasties by her Flight-dealing, dark alchemist father. 

    Then one day, Sierra discovers the fairies of her hatch are mysteriously dead. The fairy queen is missing. Her father’s Flight operation is halted, and he plans to make up for the lost income by trading her little sister to be an elixir runner for another dark alchemist, a dangerous thug. Desperate to protect her sister, Sierra convinces her father she can retrieve the lost queen and get his operation up and running.

    Sierra journeys with her best friend and her worst enemy — assigned by her father to dog her every step — to find the missing queens. Along the way, they learn that more than just her sister’s life is at stake if they fail. There are secrets in the Skyclad Mountains where the last wild fairies were seen. The magic Sierra finds there has the power to transform their world, but only if she can first embrace her calling as a fairy keeper."

Amy Bearce's debut novel was one of the more unique fairy stories I've read. The characters were well-developed and thought out, and the world was well rendered. And the Fairy Keepers - everything about this concept was interesting to me - the book definitely delivered in that respect. Sierra was a believable character, and her struggle with her lack of choices, her relationships, and her antipathy for the fairies she is bound to were well thought out.

As for the other primary characters:
Sierra's father, Jack, is a horrible, twisted man, and he constantly uses her younger sister, Phoebe, as leverage against her. This keeps Sierra under his thumb, and helps her rationalize how she harvests nectar for him. 
Corbin, Sierra's older best friend, is nerdy and gentle. However, he also harvests nectar from his fairies without a second thought, because his parents are healers who can use it to help people.
Nell, the "worst enemy" in the description, reminded me of Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon [Movies]. She was prickly, grim, and capable. However, traveling with Corbin and Sierra drags out Nell's back-story, and reveals that she and Sierra have more in common than they think.

Five things I liked:

1. The Characters. They were (for the most part) well-developed and thought out.
2. NO LOVE TRIANGLE.
   
   There are moments when it could have gone this way and it didn't. The issues of attraction, different kinds of love, and feelings were all dealt with in a mature and realistic way.
3. The whole morality issue with the Fairy Keepers' positions: did they have any right to take the nectar, what was it doing to the world, etc., was never dropped and was a major aspect of the story.
4. In that same vein, I felt like the world and its magic system had a lot of interest and depth. I would love to hear more about it.
5.  There was a great underlying message about being a steward and caretaker of the land that was never preachy.

Five things I didn't like so much:

1. The tone was a bit uneven, especially at the beginning. All of the stuff with Jack and Flight was dark and very YA, but most of the remainder was a little more Fablehaven. I would have trouble deciding exactly what group to recommend it for. Too old for middle grade, maybe 12 to 16 year olds? (This might be a marketing problem-I don't think it's an author problem)
2. My usual complaint. The world seemed like it had so much to offer, and like Bearce had put a lot of work into it, so I would have liked to read more about it.
3. Micah wasn't my favorite. He was the least necessary and least developed of the characters.
4. In that same vein, I felt like Sierra and Micah's relationship was a little off. She was only fourteen, after all, and still confused by all of her feelings about everything else. Her yo-yo back and forth from: Who is this random dude and why do I care? And I feel fuzzy when he's around, to Maybe we have something *starry eyes*  and I don't know anything about him but there's this connection I can't ignore (NOT ACTUAL THOUGHTS OR DIALOGUE-hers was much better). Or maybe it's just because I was even less interested in romance at fourteen than I am now, and my own perceptions are coloring this.
5. I felt like the ending was a little too easy. But this is really minor, as it all made sense, and played into the themes of making the harder, right decision, and doing right by the land and its creatures.

OVERALL: 4 out of 5 stars. Give this to teen girls who enjoy relationship centered stories, or liked Fablehaven and Inkheart (especially if they are looking for something shorter than both of those).