Unfortunately this ended up not being the book for me. I had high hopes but ultimately I ended up not finishing it. Thanks for the opportunity

Well that was a surprise!!

Sierra is a begrudging fairy keeper, her lifetime career determined from the moment her mark appeared on her back. Jack, her father forces her to take nectar from the fairies so her can draft his illicit drug, Flight. Sierra cares little for the fairies and even less for her abusive father, focusing instead on Phoebe, her little sister. Her life, which for so long has seemed laid out before her, is suddenly changed when Sierra finds all of her fairies, dead. She must go on a quest to find her fairy Queen and keep her father from selling her sister into slavery. Along the way she discovers that magic isn't what she thought and learns a lot about herself as well.

This is a well-crafted fairy tale, imbued with romance, magic, heroes, and villains. I highly recommend it for YA readers that love fantasy and adventure

Fairy Keeper starts off intensely: earthquakes, lost fairy nectar, an abusive dad, a sister we want to protect. We get immersed in this world pretty quickly, and we feel Sierra's desire to save her sister, terror of her father, and even fear over the fairies she finds dead. But the book is a quest book, and for much of the traveling, we're locked in Sierra's head while she complains about things. When she's at home and interacting with Jack, her abusive father, by all means, complain. But for too much of the book, she's complaining about her best friend, Corbin, falling for another girl, Nell (Sierra's not interested, but she's worried she'll lose him as a friend). It's a realistic fear, but compared to her situation at home, with her father, with her sister, with dead fairies and daily earthquakes, it feels shallow, particularly as so much of the book is spent on it and nothing else.

I also began to take issue with some of the modernisms that show up in Sierra's speech. At one point she says to a character, "Give me a break," and he asks what she means by that, and I wasn't sure if he was talking about what she was complaining about or about the words themselves. Either way, it called attention to the fact that in this secondary world, such phrasing feels very foreign. This wasn't the only place I felt the intrusion of a very modern teen attitude.

About halfway through, we're introduced to a new character. Things pick up slightly here, though Micah, the faun, was more intriguing to me as a faun rather than as a human who Sierra describes as having "god-like" beauty. As a faun, he couldn't speak, so the way he communicated was fascinating to me. As a human, he became pompous and a source of infodumping at times, which did not help with the image of "god-like" that she was giving him. A shame as he becomes her love interest (and allows her to go back to being as dense about romance as she was initially about Corbin and Nell, sigh). Sierra also gets a new relationship with her queen fairy, which made me like both of them a lot more. And Sierra accepts Corbin and Nell's relationship, so her thoughts finally stop worrying about them constantly.

The last quarter of the book really picked up, from the time Sierra and co. return home from their quest until the end, things are fairly action-packed. Even when Sierra's stuck in her head, she's still acting and she doesn't feel as selfish or shallow. Also we have more of a sense of a team between the group than we did when she set off.

I felt like the world-building was pretty strong in the book. I also enjoyed the metaphor the book had between the waning magic in the world and humans' overuse of natural resources. I also appreciated a different take on fairies from the usual (although there's a clear analogy to the disappearing bees here too)

Recommended for fans of: fantasy (lower YA? MG?); little fairies; environmental metaphors; fauns; internalization; romantically dense MCs; standalone novels; wing tattoos

*I never got around to reading and reviewing this title.*

Unfortunately I didn't like this book at all.
The beginning was interesting, but it took a long time for the more action-packed chapters to happen and by the end of the book I felt like things were really easy to solve and the characters were only interested in being in love with each other.