This reminded me of a few books I read years ago and loved, including Five by Christie Rich, so I was happy to read it! Upon starting, I found it was both different and exactly what I was looking for!

I had to DNF this book at 25%. It is too flowery for me at the moment and does not read like a YA/Adult fairytale which is why I picked it.
I am normally a girl who loves details, but this was a long winded way of getting the visuals across. It's great if it was middle grade, but if you are aiming for YA/Adult you do not need to go into abundant detail on things. We can figure things out better with less than if the sentence just keeps going on and on with no ending in sight and oh look the person planted bushes and ponds. Oh wait, false alarm.
I had to stop because I found the sentencing was taking away from the story and I could not immerse myself in it. Also, she is not seventeen like the blurb said, but eighteen when she meets the prince, who I am guessing is her true love. I don't know because I gave up trying to figure out visuals and where we were in the book because I could not tell if we were in the past, present or future.
Maybe one day I will finish reading the book, but not right now.
2 out of 5 stars as it stands.
4 out of 5 stars if it was classified as middle grade or younger.
For my full review check out my blog at https://bookgirlreviewsbooks.blogspot.com

ARC from NetGalley

DNF at 9%, half of which I skimmed.

This book is written for tweens. There are so many exclamation marks. Everything is told. It's just obnoxious. It's bad.

I chose to read this book because it was described as an adult fairy tale and I love retellings of fairy tales, but in fact I think it's pitched more at children, maybe even pre-teen children. Which is fine, but not why I picked it up!

The world building is good and the story too, I liked the fae human friendships but I did not get on with the way it's written.  I couldn't get into the flow of the writing at all and that spoilt the book for me.  I found the language used and turns of phrase sat awkwardly.  A shame, because the premise was appealing.

Fairly Slight...er I mean Faery Sight review 

2.5 stars for Adult or YA, 5 stars as a bedtime story for children pre-teen (younger middle school) or below.  For Adult, I might give it 2 stars.

This story is very imaginative yet tells far painfully more than shows. It is a rich weaving of the details of faery lands and ways, filled with writing a bit too flowery as if trying to be complex - sentences can be cumbersome at times-  but despite the tossing about of word choice, it reads as an updated version of the old color faery books (The Blue Fairy Book, The Pink Fairy Book, and so on). 



The author writes:

“There were benches scatter about where Paloma often sat in late spring afternoons to enjoy the fragrant racemes of wisteria she had lovingly planted or the restful trickling of ponds where the koi fish drifted lazily beneath lily pads.”



Whew!  Wait, she had planted wisteria and … ponds?  Oh, wait, the ponds were where she often sat…. what a sentence!  I really detest having to go back over awkward sentence construction to figure out a visual or clarify where the author was leading the visual.

or:

“The ivy clung shivering to the stone walls of the towers, and to complete the glum picture, the somber black ensigns hanging from the topmost balustrades lapped at the forbidding skies above, as if tempting the wrath of heaven to strike it all down rather than let its inhabitants dwell in the darkness that had enveloped Santillan in bitter depression since the death of Bautista two weeks prior.”



Yikes, Melville step aside!  That was one single many-visual sentence!  Yet “…and to the complete the glum picture…” jumps out, because an author rips a reader out of the story with that single trite phrase.

 

When an author isn't thinking of the visual with the sentence construction and leads us from metaphor to metaphor or analogy to analogy, and jumps so many visuals, the head trip result is jarring.  There is a lot of this in the info-dumping, and there is oh so much info dumping.  

There are also oddly placed italics, italics just for italics sake.  

Despite the overly verdant attempts at prose, this story is good for children, not YA and not adults. Yes, it's actually a perfect many-night bedtime story for a young child. It's a gentle but interesting-to-a-child plot almost saccharine sweet in presentation. The imagery is beautiful and lush (when you can get around the many-layered visuals in a single sentence).  For that purpose - young children reading - I'd rate highly. For teens and adults, I'd rate a pass, unless someone was devouring any fairy setting book possible for some research reason.  It does a good job at all the lore into one book. 

So, good for children’s bedtime stories, good for fairy research, but a pass for YA and anyone older:

It appears this book is categorized as young adult and teen. I'd put it at middle school, and the young end of that, and below. For reference, I have two young teen children. They'd not willingly read this at all. In fact, they’d run from it!   (I cannot think of a teen I know that would read this.)  But I could have read it to them between 5th and 7th grade, perhaps even younger, and they would have completely loved it then.   It’d make a decent children’s movie as well, a scripted for TV type.
  When my children were young, we watched far worse plotlines made into TV movies.  This would have been welcome.

Sweet, simple, tries too hard on flowery language choices, tons of information dumping, but richly imaginative imagery and interesting plot devices make for a traditional old fashioned tale of fae and human friendship perfect for pre-teen (before age 13, or 12 and below) children.   Faery Sight is Fairly Slight for YA.  Truly Sightless for Adult, and 2.5 stars stars for the category it's published to be, 5 stars for young middle school or pre-middle school book category.

A wonderful fairy tale or should I say faery, this is a great read, with wonderful world building by the author you can feel yourself step into another world. The characters you know are all here, faery queens and kings, evil sorceress and dashing princes. The story is exciting and a real page turner. Patricia Bossano knows how to drag you into the tale and not let go. A wonderful read, far more than I was expecting from the over and description.  I’m looking forward to future books.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion