“You are like a living rose among wax flowers. We may last forever, but you bloom brighter and smell sweeter, and draw blood with your thorns.”

Rating: 4.5 stars

I had about twelve highlights from this book, but only one usable review quote, because most of them were just snippets of Rook being an adorable dorky loser that I loved. I have such a weakness for powerful idiots, I swear. I’m giving Enchantment of Ravens 4.5 stars, but it was a very close call between 4.5 and 5. I think if I hadn’t read this immediately after Sorcery of Thorns, I might have gone for 5 stars, but funnily enough I was still book-hungover enough from Margaret’s newest book that her older one suffered ever so slightly in my opinion. Both books are incredible, though. I would say that Thorns is a fantasy with a side of romance, while Ravens is a romance in a fantasy setting. I tend to prefer the former over the latter, so that probably accounts more for the difference in rating than any actual flaws in the text. Because tbh, Rogerson’s writing is near flawless to me.

An Enchantment of Ravens initially gave me huuuuuge ACOTAR vibes, with a clever human kidnapped by a beautiful fae prince, before sidestepping that in the coolest way ever. I am in love with the way the human/fae relationship is written in this book. The fae create enchantments for the humans, to keep them safe or bring them food, or whatever they would desire. In exchange, the humans create Craft. Craft is painting, writing, cooking, sewing. Things that we sometimes see as everyday skills. I love that in this world, humans have just as much magic as the fae, and it highlights that fae magic is mundane to the fae, just like our magic seems mundane to us. Even writing a letter was mystical to the fae. Humans who are particularly favoured by the fae may gain access to the Green Well, which allows them to become a fae and access fae magic, but in exchange they would lose their Craft. This totally threw me, in a really good way, because I’m always the first person to say “hell yeah I’d do whatever I needed to do to become fae/a witch/magic in some way” but here I stopped and considered it, and actually I don’t think I would want to be immortal and magical if it meant I couldn’t write or sew or cook. 

I don’t want to go into specifics too much, because I don’t want to spoil it, but the use of fae glamours in Ravens is very cool, and really does make you rethink the idea of beautiful changeless fae.

The plot itself is fairly simple, but that’s a good thing with a romance as it focuses much more on the developing relationship between Rook and Isobel, and I enjoyed the pace that it moved along at. If you want a fantastical love story this summer, Ravens is the way to go, with charming characters that weren’t just stupid with love, and enough thrill and danger to keep it from getting boring. But you also better be reading Sorcery of Thorns, because that book deserves a read too…

Note: This review was copied verbatim from my Goodreads account dated June 13th 2019.