Escaping into My Books

That's kind of how I feel about these 2 books. Like both had elements I loved enough that they avoid 2 stars, but they also had some other issues that prevented me from LOVING the.

The Falconer, had a nice premise. I liked the world building. The different type of fairies and how they function within the world our heroine lives. I liked her relationships with the different characters. All of them felt real and believable. So it helped move the story along and pull you in. But the main conflict/story was where the issue was with me. I felt like a lot of time was spent on building the world and backdrop of the story...but not as much time and thought went into the story. It felt almost like the main story was just kind thrown in there last minute and kind of like a second thought, which would have been okay...if it was also built up in a compelling way. You can get across in a couple pages how dire a situation is and what a particular task means in the overall scheme of things, build up the tension to that moment, but I felt like this wasn't accomplished here. So when the big ending scenes happened...I kind of was left feeling like...that's it? Seemed kind of rushed. But I liked the main character... I felt the little romance teased was nicely built up...it was the story itself that had issues.

Curio...it was the same thing. The world building was VERY interesting. Both in the heroine's world and the world of the Curio. It was really such an interesting concept and world. And the individual characters were all very compelling on their own. But, but...the felt like the 3 character threads never really melded. It's like I was reading 3 separate stories, because I don't think the writer did a good enough job linking them or showing how they were linked. Also, at the end of the book, there is still not a good enough explanation I think of the Curio world and why it was created and why The Mad Tock had to be imprisoned there. The explanation was kind of...slap-dash. Kind of leaving me like feeling like...Umm...yeah...I guess. And like I felt like some of the characters motivation were not really explained too well. I was confused a lot by Whit and what he was going on about. The romantic relationships, I felt were too tacked on and it was not really explored too well.  It’s one thing to tell me these two people are drawn to each other...but I'd like to understand why at least? And just because..,magic! Doesn’t really cut it.  But really the only thing keeping this from 2 1/2 stars was the fact the magic and world building was so interesting and out of the box. I really liked that aspect.