Shaedes of Power follows the story of Opal, a faerie with unrealised power and an unusual appearance for the fae. We follow her as she stumbles into what she and the other faeries of the Shaede Court believe is the most dangerous place in their realm – The Shadowlands. Instead of finding harm, she finds love and secrets that she will have to find her way through to survive. She will have to find her way back and save the ones she has sworn to protect.
https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5182198842395474Story: 4/5
Admittedly, getting into this book at first was relatively difficult. Not because the story or the characters weren’t engaging, but because of the dialogue. Jenny was trying to put a lot of history and culture into really long monologues. I found that that was hard to engage with. Thankfully, that didn’t happen much and once I got past this, it flowed somewhat more naturally. The way in which a lot of the characters spoke didn’t seem particularly authentic. With the exception of Leyanna and Lennyx, in my opinion. That being said, I don’t know how much more authentic you can get than with a sweary fire faerie and a calm water faerie who seem to play off of each other.
Once I got past these issues, I found that the world that was built within the words was complex. It also has a really compelling an unique magic system which did take a minute to get used to, but was intriguing. There was clear favouritism for Edmyn and Opal. You can see this not only in the story itself, but through Jenny’s social media and many reviews. That being said, though, I found Farris to be the one that I was the most drawn to. I am glad that he became instrumental even though he wasn’t in the story for a really big chunk of time.
You could see both men as a yin yang sort of dynamic with Opal. Edmyn would be the dark, obsessive and jealous one while Farris was the bright, trusting and supportive one. I think that there is value in both. But I found Edmyn harder to connect with than I did with Farris. Finding out what happened before he came to join his brother in the Shadowlands did add a decent amount of depth and was really quite upsetting for him. Beyond that, I couldn’t find much more to him besides a strong sense of betrayal.
Characters: 3/5
On the other side, we get a better sense of Farris who is. He is a man who loves to collect knowledge, but had a really tragic backstory. He was given a really rough hand, found value in what he could and he became a secure, supportive man. Which is what Opal needed through the events of the story and especially in the aftermath. There may be some bias here because I adore who Farris was depicted to be, but regardless, from my perspective Farris was a more well rounded character that had a better place in the story with Opal than Edmyn did who often felt like a necessary character to create tension.
All in all, I did find this book to be engaging, especially towards the end with particular strengths found in descriptive language of surroundings. While work could be done to improve dialogue, it didn’t spoil the book as a whole. This has mild spice, a strong magic system with unique characteristics and a MMF dynamic and if that sound good, this could be the next good read for you!
If this sounds like your kind of read and you would like to read the whole story for yourself, you can find it here
If you would like to read the chapter-by-chapter commentary, you can find that here
Bookish Mumma 
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