It took me ages to finish this, but I finally did! Bits of it were slow and plodding, but other parts were enthralling. But I felt like I had to trudge through in order to get to those amazing parts. It feels like it could be the start of a series of books, because there was so much more about the trow realm that I wanted to know about, and less about Ivy. It was a super interesting concept, but maybe needed a few more drafts before publishing.

2.5 Stars
The description/blurb sounded so promising, but the book failed to live up to my expectations. The story and world were interesting and I did read the entire book, but I ended up disappointed. One of the main problems was pacing. The beginning was extremely repetitious and long. The second half went faster for me, but still included more details and unrelated happenings than necessary. And despite the length, the ending happened in about 8 pages and with little explanation. While it was left wide open for another book, for me it was a let down to have invested so much time into the book and be left with no answers.

I liked the fact that this was set in Dublin, and in an area I visited once when on a hen weekend with over 20 nurses, I could tell a story or two about that.... This had a great central character she was very likable and I enjoyed following her story, and it was quite a tale.It was very original and unlike anything I have read before.Can't give too much away but this is an engaging story and I didn't know how it would turn out, it had some interesting and imaginative characters and is well worth a read.

Court of Twilight follows Ivy, a young woman in Dublin whose flatmate, Demi, has mysteriously vanished. Ivy eventually finds Demi, uncovering a world of ancient magic along the way. I had a really hard time getting through this book for a number of reasons. The pace was very slow, making it difficult for me to keep interest. I had a hard time with the concept of a trow living with a human considering the trows are supposed to be essentially avoiding the humans like the plague. I wound up getting to about 60% of the way through and just could not finish it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Parvus Press for the opportunity to read this novel!
The originality in the novel is not lost on me. I did enjoy this novel quite a bit! However, at times I did find the writing to be confusing or unclear. Things weren't fully explained (when Ivy becomes a horse and there is no explanation?) I felt like there was also no development between Ivy's potential love interest and herself. It felt forced and unnatural. Ivy's thoughts towards him were also very unnatural. If she was attracted to him, it should have been written better. It feels fake.
The characters overall felt very unrealistic and not well rounded. It's possible that it was because we saw the world through Ivy's eyes, but I felt like even Ivy wasn't a fully formed and well rounded character.
Would I read the second novel? Possibly.
I'm interested enough to know who the Enemy is and the history behind the whole story, but there has to be a large improvement in the character development and the lack of confusing/ side details in the story. Or there needs to be more explanation, rather than events just being thrown into the novel

I was really excited about this book based on the description, I was however unable to get into it.
The characters weren't very fleshed out and I found it overly descriptive and repetitive.
Overall it went nowhere and could have been edited down to a few chapters rather than a whole book

A creative take on fairies and fantasy! I found the premise of the story incredibly interesting, and the first chapter hooked me instantly. The way that the story and world unfolds is incredibly slow but it is interesting straight away. An eccentric roommate with an affinity for plants, random people loitering, and an unseen world from human eyes. But when our main character Ivy Gallagher embarks on an adventure to find her roommate Demi the story devolved and lost its momentum, never really regaining its steam.

I found myself skimming the last 1/8th of the book - I was interested enough to find out the resolution but not engaged enough to want to read overly descriptive and seemingly unrelated comments. I always appreciate books that manage to execute twists that I do not see coming; however, I did take me about a month to read because I simply kept losing interest.

A solid 3-star fantasy book: the story is refreshingly different, the main character is well developed. It is set up well for a sequel should the author choose to continue with this world (which I would like to see more of). For me I wish that there had been more world-building on the history of the Trow and their entering Our World - I found the lack of that exposition in the end disappointing.

Hello, hello! It’s that time again, the last Wednesday of the month, which means it’s time for a book review. This month, I’ll be talking about Mareth Griffith’s Court of Twilight, which came out on October 17, 2017. First and foremost, I have to thank NetGalley and the publisher, Parvus Press, for sending me an ARC (advanced reader copy) in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the actual review.

I really wanted to like Court of Twilight by Mareth Griffith. The basic premise is that fairies (or trows, as they’re called here) exist and once a year, the King who is chosen by lottery every April is killed by the Enemy the following March. Ivy Gallagher, a seemingly normal human being, is dragged into this drama simply because she answered an ad that seemed too good to be true on Craigslist for a flatmate. Sounds fun, right? And it is to a point, but I had far too many issues with the story, so it was often hard to enjoy.

For example, Ivy was portrayed as your average twenty year old, but a lot of the time, she had about as much brain power as a box of rocks. Especially when the secret of the trows was being revealed to her. Even though the guy kept telling her that humans had a tendency to ignore the unusual, she couldn’t pick up on the blatantly obvious weirdness going on around her. It was as if she was being willfully ignorant. And she couldn’t remember names that she had heard in the last day or so, even though they were odd and important. And when she finally remembered, it was like the biggest revelation ever. Aha! moments are great, but not everything needs to be one. Worst of all, she didn’t recognize her own mother whom she had lived with until she was twelve. I understand they hadn’t seen each other in seven years, but she had pictures hanging on the fridge and everything. How could she forget her mother? Ivy was just too stupid for me a lot of the time.

I wanted to blame all of her stupidity on the veil (the mechanism that keeps trows invisible to humans), but nothing in the book supported that hypothesis. It made things invisible to the naked eye, but the book didn’t say anything about it messing with people’s memories. Unfortunately, there’s a limit to how much I can buy into characters being idiots without a reasonable explanation.

Another thing that got to me was that throughout most of the book, Ivy had no love interest (which I was totally down for because not every book needs a romantic subplot), but at the end she suddenly has feelings for a trow she had spent the majority of the book wary of and occasionally downright hating. Like, when did the whole love thing happen? And why? At least take the effort to thread it throughout the book.

Aside from that, the writing is fairly ramble-y and there’s too much filler. I don’t really care about Ivy standing by the sink eating a pot of noodles unless I’m learning things while she’s doing it. But at the same time, I’d rather see her eat noodles than have the same thought discussed in her head for an entire page or more. I found myself constantly thinking “I understand that’s how she feels, now what’s she going to do about it?” for the first two thirds of the book. I’m impatient, I know. And when things finally started getting good and I wanted it to slow down, a couple of pages later, it was over.

Ultimately, it was left wide open with more unanswered questions than I’m usually comfortable with, so I’m kind of hoping for a sequel. Even with all my issues, the premise was interesting enough that I would give a second book a shot.

I’d rate it 2 out of 5 stars as it is. It had a lot of promise, and if a little more work had gone into it (on top of what I’m sure was already a ton of work), I think it could have been great.

Overall, this is a pretty solid three-star Fantasy novel. It has a slow start, a strong middle, and an admittedly weak ending.

Ivy Gallagher is your average twenty-year-old struggling with managing her life. She’s just lost her job at a call centre, has no real skills to replace it, and the only stable things in her life are her suspiciously nice flat and weird flatmate, Demi. A couple of odd people show up to shake that stability, which leads to Demi doing a runner and Ivy discovering the literally unseen world of the trows. Trows are basically fairies.

Pros:

​The writing is good, with a decent, if small cast of characters. While there aren’t any really shocking twists, there are some good examples of well-explored Fantasy tropes on display.
I liked the world-building. It’s never too ambitious, while also giving enough information to feel satisfying.
The book as a whole is comfortable with itself and so would make a good comfort read.
Cons:

​At multiple points throughout the book, Ivy did something mind-numbingly mundane, and the narrative described it in excruciating detail. It makes the first third rather difficult to get through.
Why is Ivy the main character?
I have to expand on that last point. Ivy isn’t particularly interesting or compelling. Her problems are trivial and easily solved, yet it takes her the whole book to do that (because otherwise there would have been no book). The entire plot hinges on her having a close friendship with Demi--but she clearly does not. I honestly thought she set out to find Demi solely to get out of having to plant-sit.

The real main character ought to have been Demi. She has quirks, such as a fey-inspired vegan diet and an over the top love for plants. The plot is based on her problem. The magical world is one she belongs in. I may have forgotten due to sleep deprivation, (baby is officially a month old now, whee) but I don’t recall her ever explaining why she wanted a flatmate in the first place, nor why she chose Ivy. As far as I could see, Ivy is just there so the main character could be an audience proxy who has things explained to her. With Demi as the main character, the ending could have easily been shored up, and the antagonist could have been much stronger.

I was impressed by the way the author sprinkled little details throughout that she later drew back on to great effect. Even when it didn’t work, it’s a very nice touch that not everyone even attempts. I’d love to see a long sprawling series from Griffith, where that style of foreshadowing would really shine.

An unusual and original take on fairies and fantasy. Amusing and suspenseful, I would recommend to fantasy enthusiasts.

Loved it, will definitely purchase a sequel to see what happens next. Who is the enemy, what happens with ivys mum, Is demi next, Please make it soon! Here is a review by Gemma: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2086502586

This review appears on Goodreads and will be cross-posted to my blog in the future.

This book was an odd one to review, because I might have liked it more had I not read it immediately after coming back from a trip to Dublin; however, that trip to Dublin was exactly why this book went to the top of my to-read list, because I thought it would be nice to fictionally revisit the city. And unfortunately, this book didn't take me there.

Instead, the book was distractingly American in tone. While there were enough place names dotted around to make it clear that the author knew the area fairly well, something about the phrasing was just OFF the whole way through. What particularly stood out to me was a mention of a character's graduation from school with a mortarboard and gown and so on -- and while I'm not 100% sure and will happily be corrected on this, I'm fairly sure this is an American concept that hasn't spread to Ireland yet, becuase I've never heard of a high school graduation there.

The folklore used in the book also WASN'T Irish, and this bothered me. The acknowledgements indicated that it came from the Shetlands, in which case I'd question why the book isn't set in the Shetlands or, at the very least, in Scotland. Folklore is very closely tied into a sense of place, and to me it makes no sense to just dislocate a concept like that: the Shetlands and Dublin are far from interchangeable, as they have a very different landscape and history, even if they're geographically nearby (particularly from the perspective of an American author).

If there had seemed to be a sensible reason for using this folklore but setting the book in Dublin, I would have rolled with it. I'm not exactly a purist about that kind of thing. But there didn't seem any particular reason why the book HAD to take place in Dublin, and if the author was dead-set on writing a book set there that featured fairy-like creatures... well, there are plenty of those in Irish folklore to work with. It's pretty famous for them, you know? Whereas if you want to write about trows (a being I'd never come across before), leave them in the Shetlands where they apparently belong.

I don't know. It doesn't feel right to take one country's folklore and plonk it down in another, in a totally different landscape, without explanation, as though the two are interchangeable and don't have their own social and cultural history behind them.

This, combined with the phrasing, meant that the book didn't feel as Irish as it might have done. Would I have noticed if I hadn't got back from a trip to Dublin literally the day before? Possibly not, or maybe I'd have noticed but dismissed the differences as British and Irish people being dissimilar enough that what I thought were Americanisms could plausibly be Irishisms. However, I've talked to a LOT of Irish people in the last three weeks and I know that the characters in this book didn't sound like them.

All of this feels rather negative and suggests that I didn't enjoy the book, which isn't true. I did. I even liked the folklore stuff, despite the caveats above and my discomfort with that. Fairy-like creatures are my thing, as anyone who knows me will be aware. There were clear stakes and plenty of twists and turns in the plot to keep it from being predictable; a couple of times when I thought I'd guessed what would happen next, I hadn't, and my predictions for how Demi would be saved turned out to be totally off the mark. It's painfully rare for me not to randomly guess plot points miles in advance, so I'm always pleased when a book keeps me guessing.

I did feel like it was probably a little too long: while the period of confusion at the beginning is necessary before Ivy discovers the world of the trows and so on, it went on for a bit too long and I was starting to get distracted. I kept reading, because I did want to know what was up with her weird flatmate, but if it had lasted much longer I might possibly have given up. So the early part of the book could maybe have been cut back a little.

Ivy was, on the whole, a pretty sympathetic character, and I liked that she was one of those rare protagonists who actually has to worry about money and jobs and everyday concerns. It helped to ground the rest of what was going on, and give it a basis in reality, as well as making her more appealing.

But to be honest, I requested this from NetGalley because it was set in Dublin and I was about to go there, and I read it the day after I got back (because I was too ill to do anything but read), and its Irishness ended up being the least convincing aspect of it. In my opinion, folklore should be left in the country of its birth unless there's a good reason to move it; folk stories are so closely entwined with their sense of place that displacing them rips the heart right out. (And why write a book about fairy-like beings, set in Ireland, that doesn't use Irish folklore? Which is some of the most well-known and interesting with regards to fairies? Or why not set a book about Shetland folklore in the Shetlands? These decisions just don't make sense to me.)

One last point, though: the acknowledgements suggest that the author was a NaNoWriMo participant, and since NaNo's been a big part of my writing life so far, I have to give kudos for that. It's always nice to see a NaNo author actually get published.

An enjoyable, magical mystery romp through Dublin that sets itself up perfectly for a sequel.