Review – Rebel Fey by Barb Hendee (3/5 stars)

This book is the fifth installment of The Noble Dead series by Barb and JC Hendee. This has been a pretty good series.

In this book Leesil, Magiere, Wynn, and Chap make their way into the elvish lands to find and rescue Leesil’s mother who is being held captive by the very elves she was working for. As you can imagine upon entering the elvish land things start to get complicated. The party run into a number of elves that they have meet before. They are granted guardianship by Sgaile and Leesil finds that the Most Aged Father of the elves wants to make a deal to bargain for the freedom Leesil’s mother Nien’a. Chane and Welstial are seen infrequently in the book and their quest to find the place of Welstial’s dream doesn’t make much progress.

There are many plotline advances and surprises in this book. You find out more about the secret group of elves that Nien’a is part of and what their plans are for Leesil. You find out more about Magiere and what her involvement as the Sister of the Dead is. You find out a lot about Chap. In fact much of this book is centered around Chap and he takes a center role in this book which is a bit unusual for a glorified dog 🙂 You find out more about Chap’s mission and his position with the Fey. There are a few new and endearing characters introduced in this book; I especially like the old elf Glenn, Chap’s girlfriend Lily, and we learned a lot more about Botun (not sure of this spelling). The Most Aged Father was also an interesting, if unlikeable, character.

All the above being said I was very disappointed with the pacing of this book. There really isn’t much that happens in the first 2/3rd’s of the book. It took me forever to get through this book because it just wasn’t holding my interest. I feel like we spent a lot of time listening to Leesil whine, listening to Magiere listen to Leesil whine, you listen to Wynn whine, and you listen to Chap whine. It was ridiculous. Thankfully the last third of the book had a ton of action, huge amounts of plot development, and really hooked me again. The main quest in the book is resolved but I felt like a lot more questions were created at the end that will, most likely, be answered in the next book of the series.

Maybe this book should get more then 3 stars but I didn’t think it really compared to the other books in the series. In general this whole series had been of mediocre writing quality. I think the only thing that draws me to it and keeps me reading is that these are nice basic swords and sorcery books with a vampire twist to them..oh yeah and they have that whole darkness is going to destroy the world going on in the background. I really hope that this series doesn’t continue for more than a couple more books. Any longer than that and I think it will be just barely limping along.

Here is a link to the book on amazon: