Olga Godim

I received this Kindle ARC through NetGalley, courtesy of the author

Sarah Wynde has changed her genre, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve been her fan since her first Tassamara novel, A Gift of Ghosts (my review here). All three Tassamara novels were delightful paranormal romances.
This one is pure fantasy with lascivious overtones. No romance manifested, but the story is super-inventive on the world building side. The writer’s imagination must’ve been on overdrive when she wrote this book.
It starts with the protagonist Fen, a twenty-one-year-old bookstore clerk, deciding how to die. Of course, she doesn’t want to die, but a strange man traps her in a dark alley and offers her a choice: a bottle of pills or a bullet in the brain. She chooses pills as the lesser evil, but then she gets lucky, the story flips around, and Fen is plunged into a fantastic adventure.
Her life before the bookstore hadn’t been easy. Her mother died when she was a teen, she went through several foster homes, lived on the streets, did drugs, but that’s all in her past and only hinted at in the story. When the novel starts, Fen has already got her act together. She works, studies, and generally lives like a responsible if poor adult. But nothing in her existence has prepared her for what happened after her aborted murder.
She meets gorgeous guys, discovers she has magic galore (if only she knew how to use it), learns to communicate telepathically, and gets swept willy-nilly to an underwater city full of marvels, a mix between a Disney World and Atlantis.

“All right,” she said. “Okay. Not elves. Atlantis. That’s cool. I get that. This is Atlantis.”
…
“Of course not,” Luke said … “Lan Tis is at least three thousand miles away. It’s nowhere near here.”

A little humor goes a long way, but Fen also learns that not everything is as smooth and glittering in the not-Atlantis as it seems on the surface. Sparkling lights and gurgling fountains can’t camouflage the political intrigues that explode in her face. Her tattoos talk to her, and too many rules she can’t understand bombard her on all sides. Oh, and she keeps escaping from the bad guys who keep trying to kill her. All in all, a fantasy caper worth reading about.
The pacing is uneven, a bit slow in the beginning but it picks up nicely after about 20% mark on my Kindle.
Many of the characters are fascinating, but Fen as the protagonist stands out. Her intimate acquaintance with tragedy and poverty made her tough and smart, but she hasn’t lost her decency or her moral compass. She accepts the ugly with the beautiful, and she fights like a cat for what she believes in. If only the others didn’t keep her in the dark and explained things, she might’ve done even better.
The others all belong to the alien underwater world. Most of them are good guys but they think differently and act differently than humans. The author is consistent in her depiction of their exotic society, its weird but logical rules and its ancient history. Along with Fen, I sometimes wished for a textbook on this bizarre and unique civilization.
As you see, I loved many aspects of this book. So why 4 stars instead of 5? I didn’t like two things. First – Fen is a bit risqué. Instead of falling in love with one guy, as is customary in most novels, she falls in lust with almost every guy. There is no sex on the pages or in the story, but she longs for it, indiscriminately, like a bitch in heat. Of course, they are all splendid male specimen, like mythical elves, but I wish she would choose one.
On the other hand, this underwater world has a skewed gender ratio: one female for every four or five males. Maybe the women there are encouraged to take more than one partner? Maybe the author is preparing the ground for the next installment of her story.
My second complaint – the novel ends in a cliffhanger. I dislike such endings. Nothing is resolved by the last page. In fact, it feels like it’s only the first part of the story. Everything is half-done: every relationship and every plotline. I would’ve read the second book of the series anyway: I like this writer. She didn’t have to trick me into continuing.
Otherwise – an adorable romp across an unfamiliar landscape with a charming heroine.

Recommended.

Note: I added this book to the database but didn't know how to add a cover from a URL. When I tried to add the cover, the program directed me to choose it from my computer. So the cover provided is a photo from Amazon.