Dust


By Devon Ashley
Published on September 18, 2012
Source: The Book Babe's Blog Tour
4. The number of times my delicate wings have been broken and clamped behind my back.
68. The number inked upon my skin, marking me the sixty-eighth pixie to be stolen.
87. The number of days I've been wrongfully imprisoned.
88. The first day the faeries will regret stealing me.

Healthy. Cheery. Vivacious. All traits Rosalie has before becoming enslaved by the faeries to make an endless supply of pixie dust. Now that Rosalie has been traumatized by slave labor, extreme desolate conditions and multiple deaths, this hardened pixie is anything but. When this rebellious teenager attempts an escape, she’s isolated in cramped quarters until she learns her place. Just as she begins to let go of all that hope, she finds an unlikely friend in Jack, the faerie assigned to guard her. Interspecies dating is forbidden in the fae world, so their growing attraction is unacceptable. And even if Jack can find a way to free her, they know the prison is the only place they can truly be together.
I haven't read too many books about fae in the past, so I didn't really know what to expect out of this book, especially one where there are absolutely no humans present. Rosalie doesn't interact with the human world at all, and in fact doesn't even mention them at all. So it was neat to read something that focused entirely on the world of pixie, faeries, and other woodland creatures. The author does some pretty cool worldbuilding that is presented in a way that usually doesn't feel like an "info-dump" whenever Rosalie is explaining certain things about hierarchy, expectations, community life, and different species of fae.

Rosalie is an awesome main character. Through her, we are introduced to the way of life of her group of pixies. Though they're all pretty free-spirited, Rosalie is more so than most, and she enjoys spending time alone with nature rather than waiting around to be courted by another pixie. She is very independent and while some might characterize her as a loner, I would just say that she knows what she wants and that isn't always what everyone else thinks she should want.

The book follows Rosalie as she is abducted from her pixie hollow and imprisoned without reason.  Even through this ordeal which breaks the spirits (and the bodies) of most other pixies, Rosalie remains strong and defiant, refusing to believe that she is going to be enslaved forever.  There is, of course, the requisite love interest, and while I generally take issue with the whole "falls in love with person holding her captive" trope (the captor always has more power over the captive, so the scenario creates weird power issues), the book handles the issue well by having Jack be a reluctant captor who works to try to find a way to free Rosalie.  (I'd say that this was a spoiler, except for the fact that it's right there in the blurb.)

I do wish that we'd gotten to learn more about Jack and his personality.  We see him for only brief periods of time whenever he is checking on Rosalie, so she herself is still learning about him.  I suspect we'll learn more about him in the next books.  I did expect more of the book to be devoted to her revenge against her captors, given the line of "the first day the faeries will regret stealing me" in the summary.  Instead, the book is all about her captivity, so I'm guessing the other books in the series will be about her exposing her captors.

The book was a quick read and while there was some level of violence towards Rosalie and the other captive pixies, the romance aspect was very clean.  For the first book in a series it did its job very well - it introduced the major players, made me care about Rosalie and what happened to her, and made you want to read more!

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