If you like books like The Cruel Prince and A Court of Thorns and Roses, this is a good candidate for your next read! It was overall an entertaining read with a quick-paced plot and an interesting cast. I felt like the magic system was a little bit underdeveloped and I wish it was expanded on further, but it still added that element of fantasy I look for when reading.
I was disappointed by the ending unfortunately. I felt like maybe Ciccarelli wrote herself into a corner with the romance and didn't know how to resolve it so she went with... that underwhelming conclusion.
The cover is absolutely gorgeous though!

The narrator did an impeccable job at making me feel transported into the world. Kristen Ciccarelli has written such a captivating and enchanting world that pulls you in the same way Emeline Lark is drawn to the woods and the woods drawn to her. Edgewood starts with the slow creep of a magical world wanting to come alive with every musical note until it is the center point and Emeline has dived into the forest and its world. Not everything is as it seems. She is swept up on an adventure to save her grandfather but she will discover more about herself along the way. A swoon worthy story with a lyrical feel throughout. This is not a book to be missed in 2022. A must read

Okay so I feel like I gave this book a much fairer chance than I thought it deserved. From the start I could not stand Emeline. Also, I felt this book had such a weird concept that would have better fit in middle grade rather than NA where it's clearly supposed to sit. Also, I totally understand that's it's enemies to lovers, but Hawthorne is the literal worst. He's constantly a jerk to Emeline. So no likable characters. Check.

Then what actually had me hate this book was that Hawthorne sketched a sixteen year old child nude. What the actual hell?!?! As if that's not bad enough, the big reveal comes right after that so the fact that Hawthorne has mega pedo vibes is completely overlooked! This book is categorized as YA. I cannot in good conscience recommend a book to teenagers where a girl's bf sketches her naked and underage, and the book just basically ignores it.

So thank you to NetGalley and Macmillian audio for this ALC and although Caitlin Kelly was a fine narrator, this book is a no from me.

I should have known I was in trouble when I didn't realize this was contemporary fantasy and went "Electricity? In the first chapter? The audacity."

Huge thank you to Raincoast Books for the early copy!

Emmeline is this close to making her dream of having a career as a successful singer a reality. A dream she has chased since she left Edgewood behind two years ago with its strange fae legends she refuses to believe. All she has to do is play well as the opening act on her first international tour, and she'll have that fancy record deal. But the news of her grandfather going missing has her racing home ... and into the forest when she's told he's been tithed to Wood King. The fae are real, every story true, and to rescue her grandfather, she must pledge herself to the King to be his new Song Mage. If she can survive singing each song, that is.

This wasn't what I expected, and I don't quite know why. My advance copy's summary describes a nursing home, which really should have tipped me off that this was not a high fantasy like I thought. I don't usually read contemporary fantasy but I'm a sucker for a good forest book, and that cover was too pretty to resist. I've read some really good ones in this genre, and this did not fall in the same category. Honestly, reading about jeans and being reminded regularly that Emmeline wears Blundstones kind of sucked the magic out of it for me.

I did quite like Emmeline. She was forced to grow up too fast as a teenager because of things wholly out of her control. She cares so deeply about her family and her career dreams, and I can relate to her on the same level. Her grandfather is all she has left to her family, even if he is losing his memory, and singing is all she feels good at. Without both, she's nothing, so it made her journey through Edgewood so intriguing. I loved her trying to run away from the forest, only for it to come to her every time she sings. It's exactly the kind of magic I hoped for, but I felt it wasn't utilized to its full potential throughout.

This book's pacing was its downfall. For a standalone, it is quite slow. Not to mention it takes a long time to get itself together. In hindsight, the subplots are crafted so slowly and so far apart that by the time they weave together to take us to the end, it no longer felt like it mattered. So much of it seemed unimportant at the time while other pieces sort of felt like I was taking Emmeline's word for it because I didn't see the evidence. It made the so-called villain at the heart of this story lacklustre and, honestly, hard to pin down. The biggest indicator of the pacing for me was it took a full week to finish reading. Normally I can read 100 pages over a day, and I was lucky if I read 50 because there wasn't much capturing my attention.

I'm very on the fence with the romance in this. On the one hand, I totally ship it. The love interest is precisely one of my favourite types, all secretive and brooding but with a wonderfully warm and soft heart and the best ulterior motives. And I love that Emmeline is so sex positive, with there being a few, very minimal detail - aka YA appropriate - sex scenes. On the other hand, the smaller details of her romance kind of wigged me out. There were some choices the author made that I didn't jive with, so I wasn't fully on board with it in the end.

This book was very much just a "meh" with a shrug type for me. Rounding my rating up to three.

Based off the description, I really wanted to love this book, but it just wasn’t it for me. I thought the writing was good, but I just didn’t connect with the characters.