Kiss of the Goblin Prince

March 19, 2012
Husk follows The Goblin King with an even more ponderous paranormal. Her premise holds promise: a goblin prince returns to the human Fixed Realm after millennia of banishment and feels a deep connection with a human woman. Unfortunately, Dai’s internal angst-fest over actions he undertook to protect his family, first from the Romans and then in the Tartarus-like Shadowlands, constantly disrupts the narrative flow. Dai kept himself and his brother alive for 2,000 years by becoming a warrior scholar of magic, but in the Fixed Realm his experiments with magic are dangerous to Birch Trustees, a secretive organization that confiscates his books and monitors his activities. His love interest, Amanda, has something like agency, but the emphasis on her sad lot in life (widowed while six months pregnant, now mother to a frail and sickly child) is as painfully unsubtle—and uninteresting—as Dai’s self-flagellation.

April 15, 2012
Husk's rich, well-developed world building makes this dark tale of loyalty, love, and redemption equally appealing to both romance and fantasy readers. Amanda, a widow with a young daughter, Brigit, who is so ill she will most likely not survive childhood, and Dai, a man who appears to be in his twenties but has spent thousands of years living as a goblin in the Shadowlands, meet when Amanda's sister-in-law marries Dai's brother. Dai has used his long, torturous life to study magic and healing, and has become a scholar who loves books more than gold. Even though he and his brother Roan have escaped after centuries of enslavement to the Romans who overran their home in Wales, they are now fighting for their lives in the goblin-infested Shadowlands. As he mourns for his companions who did not escape, Dai realizes that a horror he was forced to commit eons ago may be the cause of Brigit's affliction. Even though Husk's latest is part of the Shadowlands series, it is enthralling enough on its own.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)