The Golden Book of Faerie

Sometimes you just need to get lost in am adventure book: a quest book where the heroines are excited, not compelled, to complete their journeys. The Hunter's Moon is such an adventure book, a story deeply woven with Irish myth.

The writing in this book, most often the descriptions of landscape and magic, is fantastically beautiful, singular and inimitable. The incorporation of Faerie and the Irish landscape is wonderful and rich. Yet the plot feels forced, with the characters responding to the bend of the author's will rather than the natural progression of story. Melling tried to make me care about the characters and their bonds together, but there were just too many people, too few pages, and too much cringeworthy dialogue in this book for that to happen. The romances were not realistic or believable or even particularly romantic, and the ending was an unsurprising copout.

This book is definitely worth reading, especially for fans of Irish folklore, quest stories, and lovely descriptive writing, but it is not a well-rounded book.