5 Star #Review of The Girl Who Never Was by @SkylarDorset #Published @SourcebooksFire with #Giveaway ~ Crossroad Reviews

THE GIRL WHO NEVER WAS is the story of Selkie Stewart, who thinks she’s a totally normal teenager growing up in Boston. Sure, her father is in an insane asylum, her mother left her on his doorstep—literally—when she was a baby, and she’s being raised by two ancient aunts who spend their time hunting gnomes in their Beacon Hill townhouse. But other than that her life is totally normal! She’s got an adventurous best friend who’s always got her back and an unrequited crush on an older boy named Ben. Just like any other teenager, right?
When Selkie goes in search of the mother she’s never known, she gets more than she bargained for. It turns out that her mother is faerie royalty, which would make Selkie a faerie princess—except for the part where her father is an ogre, which makes her only half of anything. Even more confusing, there’s a prophecy that Selkie is going to destroy the tyrannical Seelie Court, which is why her mother actually wants to kill her. Selkie has been kept hidden all her life by her adoring aunts, with the help of a Salem wizard named Will. And Ben. Because the boy she thinks she’s in love with turns out to be a faerie whose enchantment has kept her alive, but also kept her in the dark about her own life.

Now, with enchantments dissolved and prophecies swinging into action, Selkie finds herself on a series of mad quests to save the people she’s always loved and a life she’s learning to love. But in a supernatural world of increasingly complex alliances and distressingly complicated deceptions, it’s so hard to know who to trust. Does her mother really wish to kill her? Would Will sacrifice her for the sake of the prophecy? And does Ben really love her or is it all an elaborate ruse? In order to survive, Selkie realizes that the key is learning—and accepting—who she really is.

Finished

About the Author

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Skylar’s first story was a tale of romantic intrigue involving two feuding factions of squirrels. Think “Romeo & Juliet” but with bushy tails and added espionage. She was seven.

Since that time, Skylar’s head has been filled with lots of characters and lots of drama. She is delighted to be able to share some of it with all of you now, because, honestly, it was getting pretty loud and crowded in there.

Skylar is a born-and-bred New Englander, which is why Boston was a natural setting for her debut novel, THE GIRL WHO NEVER WAS. Skylar shares her home with a cardboard cutout of the Tenth Doctor, lots of Mardi Gras beads from the time she spent living in New Orleans, and a harp she’s supposed to be teaching herself to play. She’d like to get a dog.

My Review 5 Never Trust a Faerie Stars

I wasn't really sure about this one when I started it. The author had come on my #ReadOn show, with Erin Bowman author of Taken and Frozen. which you can see below. And well I have to say that I was really excited to read it. But, when I started it I was scared that I wasn't going to like it. As to start out it is fairly confusing. But, you learn early on that its kinda what makes the book great! I loved the story which was a great blend of mystery, faerie logic, romance, and time. It took me about a day to get through it, or maybe a minute. It all depends on the time you are keeping. (ya I had to put that in there)

But, it was wonderful! And as its a dualology book two review will post tomorrow. And is out really soon. Its a deff book not to miss. You don't even have to wait an entire year for book two! So how cool is that!

The characters were great. I did figure out the big mystery or at least I thought I did (yes I ended up being right) around the last section before everyone else did. But, that was ok. It didn't take away from the book at all. The romance was fab no love triangle there. I loved her aunts and would love a prequel about them. As well as her father who plays a not really there character in the book.

There is a somewhat of a cliffhanger in this one but again you don't have to wait until next year to finish. But, it did make me cry.

The story as a whole was great. It was fast paced and we get a lot of information in a very short amount of time.

Go Into This One Knowing

No love triangle, Cliffhanger that will make you cry, Fast Paced, Confusing Faeries Logic.
"All opinions are 100% honest and my own."

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

E

One day, my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. Nine months later, I appeared on his doorstep. One year later, my aunts succeeded in getting him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
This is how the story of my birth goes.
My father says my mother was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. I always ask how she ended up on his couch. Where did she come from? I ask. Why was she there? Did you know her? My father always looks at me vaguely. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, he tells me, and then he tells me the story of my name. Selkie, he says. She told me to name you Selkie. And I ask, How did she tell you? And he replies, She etched it into a snowflake, sighed it into a gust of wind, rustled it through the trees of autumn, rippled it over a summer pond.
And my aunts sigh and say, That's enough.
And when I ask my aunts about my mother, all they will ever say is that she was "flighty."
When I was little, I used to think maybe my mother would come to take me away. Aunt True and Aunt Virtue aren't exactly my aunts. They are my dad's aunts, making them my great-aunts, and therefore old-older than I could pinpoint when I was young. Now that I'm older, I know that they're older than my dad, but I can't quite figure out exactly how much older. Dad was their little brother's only child, I know, but the dates of births in my family are fuzzy. Who wants to remember how old they are? Aunt True asks me. I have never had a birthday party. Or an acknowledgment of my birthday. But I do have a birthday.
It is today.
I am sitting on Boston Common, watching the tourists get lost and the leaves fall, and I am thinking. The Common is the huge park in the middle of Boston. The story I have always been told is that it was originally a cow pasture and that the paved paths meandering through it follow the original cow paths, and I believe that; there is an aimlessness to them. I like that about Boston Common. I like that the place feels like it has no discernible purpose, in this age without cows. It is unnecessary, a frivolity in the middle of the city, prime real estate that isn't even landscaped, really, is just basic grass and some scattered trees. It is a place that just is, and I have always found, sprawled on the ground and looking at the buildings that crowd around it, that it is the perfect place to think.
I am, according to my birth certificate, seventeen today. I don't know whether or not to believe my birth certificate, though, honestly. Some days I feel that I must be much older than seventeen and that somebody got it all wrong: my addle-minded father or my aunts who don't keep track of dates. And some days I feel much younger than seventeen, like a small child, and I just want my mother.
I feel that way now.
I am thinking of my mother, of how I am told I resemble her. I have never seen her photograph, so all I can do is study myself in the mirror and draw conclusions from there. Tall, I suppose, the way I am tall. Slender the way I am slender. It must be from her that I get my pale skin that resists all of my efforts to get it to tan, since my aunts and father have naturally olive complexions. It must be from her that I get my blue eyes, my blond hair so light that it can be white in certain lights. I wear my hair long, and I wonder if my mother did-if she does still, wherever she is.
"Hey," says Ben, interrupting my thoughts. Ben works at one of the stands scattered through the Common. On hot summer days, Ben makes fresh-squeezed lemonade that he gives me for free. He brings it to me while I lie on the grass in the heat and read books and tell him what they're about. Now, at the time of year when it can be summer or winter both in the same day, Ben makes lemonade or sells sweatshirts, as the mood strikes him. It must be sweatshirts today, because he's brought me one, and he drops it playfully on top of my head, draped so that it momentarily obscures my vision.
I feel like I have known Ben all my life, but that's not true. I just can't remember the first time I met him is the problem. I have always come to the Common to be alone, alone among the strangers, and Ben has always been in the background of life on the Common. I don't know when we started speaking to each other, when he started bringing me lemonade, when we learned each other's names. It all just happened, the way good things just happen without having to be forced. Ben is-I think-older than me in a way that always makes me feel very young, but I don't think he does it on purpose, the way the college guys do when we cross paths on the T, Boston's sprawling and ever-crowded subway system. Ben is effortlessly older than me. He is tall-taller than me-and thin-maybe thinner than me too, honestly-and has a lot of thick, dark, curly hair and very pale eyes whose color I can never quite pinpoint, and for a little while now, I have been ignoring the attention of Mike Summerton at school because there is Ben. But I don't think Ben is thinking that way, and what's really kind of annoying is that, in a relationship where I don't ever remember even having to tell Ben my name, why should I have to tell him that we're kind of dating, even if he doesn't know it and has never kissed me? He should just know, the way he knew I'd like lemonade and that I was cold and needed a sweatshirt.
"What are you up to?" he asks me, dropping to the leaf-strewn grass next to me. Ben moves with an absentminded elegance. When he drops to the ground, it almost feels like he floats his way down. It sounds weird, but it's the only way I can think to describe it: a soft, fluttering quality to the way Ben moves. It is, trust me, very appealing. Ben never clumsily plops to the ground beside me. Ben always sort of sinks there. And you get the feeling, watching Ben move, that everything he does is very deliberate, no motion wasted. It makes it terribly flattering when he uses those deliberate, studied motions to come talk to you-terribly flattering and the slightest bit annoying. I am not known for my grace. Not that I'm the clumsiest person ever, but let's just say I know I'm never going to be a ballerina. My aunts say that I move with "Stewart stubbornness," trying to refuse to yield to hard objects or even gravity at times-that that is one thing, at least, that I did not inherit from my mother. I guess I have to take their word for it. In my head, whenever I imagine her, my "flighty" mother moves so fluidly she could be floating.
"It's wet," Ben says of the grass, and he crinkles his nose in displeasure, shaking his hands like a fastidious cat and all of his motions are so beautifully choreographed that he is painful to look at.
"Yeah," I reply, as if Ben is not painful for me to look at and is just a regular friend, hanging out on the Common with me.
Ben shrugs and takes the sweatshirt out of my hands.
"Hey," I protest as he puts it on the ground and sits on it. "I was going to wear that."
"You know I hate to be wet," he says. And he does. I do know this. He wraps the cups of lemonade he sells in thickets of napkins to keep condensation away from his hands. He complains vociferously whenever it rains. He has sixteen different ways of fending off dampness. I always ask him why he lives in Boston and sells things outside if he hates the rain so much; it rains here a lot. And Ben always shrugs. Ben shrugs in response to lots of things. Like whenever I ask him why he doesn't go to school. He is-I think-too old for high school, although he never confirms this. But why not college then? One of the two hundred colleges in the Boston area?
And Ben shrugs.
"Today is my birthday," I blurt out. I don't know why I say it just then. I never tell anyone my birthday. I expect Aunt True and Aunt Virtue to come running out of the townhouse to scold me about how polite people never reveal such personal information.
But nobody comes dashing across Beacon Street. The piano player outside the entrance to the T plays something tinkling and tuneless. Ben says, "Happy birthday." He does not ask me how old I am. I am glad for that. It seems weird to say that I'm seventeen when I feel so much younger than that. Then he says, "It's the autumnal equinox. You were born on the autumnal equinox."
"Not really. Well, I don't know. The autumnal equinox is different every year."
Ben shrugs.
I want to tell him that I would like to find my mother.
I don't.
***
Kelsey is my best friend. She has never been inside my house though. I don't allow anybody inside my house. The air in that house shouldn't be disturbed by outside people. Aunt True and Aunt Virtue wouldn't even know how to address a new person. They have been talking to the same people for centuries it feels like. "A proper Bostonian never talks to strangers," they tell me, and their definition of stranger means "every person on the planet except the four people we know." Life on Beacon Hill, for a certain type of Bostonian, has not changed in hundreds of years. Sometimes I think it will never change.
But today...today I think maybe change is right around the corner. I feel like even the air I'm breathing feels lighter.
Kelsey is waiting for me on the sidewalk, and I jump over the last two front steps to meet her. This is not really like me, and she lifts her eyebrows.
"I have a good feeling," I tell her.
She smiles. "Good. Me too." Kelsey always has a good feeling when we are about to go on what she considers to be an adventure. Kelsey likes adventures. She would have started looking for her mother ages ago had she been in my position. She adjusts the bag slung over her shoulder and tips her chin in the direction of the Common. "Let's go," she says.
My house sits right on Beacon Street, on the very outer edge of the higgledy-piggledy, charm-personified area of Boston known as Beacon Hill, a place whose very streets were literally designed to try to keep the less desirable element out, set out in a rabbit w...