The Wannabe Knight: a Page on Words

Blog Tour/Book Review: Bridger by Megan Curd + Giveaway

October 13, 2011 at 9:23 PM (Blog Tours, Book Reviews, Giveaways) (blog tour, Bridger, faeries, fantasy, giveaways, Megan Curd, review, YA)

Wow, many apologies everyone!  The lateness of this post is a fail on my part.  It was my mom’s birthday today and I haven’t really had a chance to hit up the computer until now.  Anyway, here’s my review!

Bridger by Megan Curd

Ashlyn McVean’s life will never be the same after her father’s sudden death.  But unlike most people who have to deal with loss, she also suddenly has to deal with faeries and centuries-old grudges and a grandmother, Memaw, who has always kept her at a distance.  Until now.  Why has her grandmother been hiding any sense of emotion from her all these years?  Or what has Memaw been hiding from Ashlyn?

To be honest, I wasn’t sure about Bridger when I first started reading it.  There seemed to be a lot of hedging around oddities that happen to or around Ashlyn, but nothing really gets explained for a while.  From a writer’s standpoint it seems that some of the weird things that come up get pointed out by Ashlyn, who is our narrator, and narrative attention is paid but then Ashlyn simply pushes these interesting things aside to get on with the story.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  It definitely shows that Megan Curd has a good handle on her protagonist’s voice and thoughts.  Just, sometimes it was a bit frustrating to become invested in a strange event and then have the narrator brush off this investment.  One thing that bugs me is the necklace.  You’ll know what I’m talking about if you read the book.  I know it’s there to lay ground for future books, but I’m just so curious about it!

But the hedging is only problematic until the story starts to really pick up.  There is a definitely pivotal moment in the story that anyone who reads this novel will notice, and once I reached that point, I was hooked.  I wasn’t paying so much attention to the writing anymore, unless I thought there was something good about it.  For instance, I love Ashlyn’s funny thoughts.  I grinned a lot at the playful way she thinks, and also at the funny lines other characters had to say.  That was cool.

Also, Curd has a great sense of worldbuilding.  During exposition and backstory passages, I was impressed by how much thought went into creating this situation, its history, and its possibilities.  I’m not an expert on faerie/changeling lore but there’s a lot of cool stuff going on that seems original to me.  Sometimes there’s so much cool stuff that it’s kind of complicated and confusing–I will admit, I was confused about a few things even at the end–but this is a good problem to have.  It’s so much better to know the author has been thinking about all these different details and imbuing this world with them.

Okay, I should address the love story.  You all know I’m more conservative when it comes to the romance parts of the books I read.  There was a good chunk of romance here, kind of a love triangle… and at one point a love square, I think.  It was all right, maybe a touch overbearing in a couple of spots, but it wasn’t the absolute main focus of the story so it was fine.  The main couple got together kind of quickly for my taste, but I was down with it because there is a whole other side to their relationship that crops up and causes complications for them.  Which is great.  Always nice to have some dimension to these relationships, I say.

So there you have it.  The deeper I got into this book, the better it got.  One downside is that it’s definitely the first in a series.  I could tell by the way the action ramped up and that things were getting cooler and cooler as the end approached to culminate in a pseudo-cliffhanger.  Yikes!  If the second book, Traitor, is anything like the second half of Bridger, I am so there.

Ashlyn can’t help who she is, heck she is still discovering who–and what–she is, but she rises to the occasion to fight a fight that wasn’t originally hers to begin with.  I know how that situation feels, even though I don’t have faeries in my life.  Despite all the fantastic things going on, I could really connect emotionally with Ashlyn and the others, especially Memaw and Reese.  I just hope that as much as Curd explored the power Ashlyn is capable of in this book, she draws up some limits to her nature in the next book for balance.

That said, this series has some definite promise!

Thanks to A Tale of Many Reviews for organizing this blog tour and providing the review copy.

So there’s my review!  To read other posts having to do with Bridger and Megan Curd, check out the other blogs on the tour via the list at A Tale of Many Reviews.

And now for the giveaway!  If you’d like to enter to win an ebook copy of Bridger by Megan Curd, please leave a comment with your name and email address.

And don’t forget to follow the tour to the end at A Tale of Many Reviews for the grand prize giveaway!  You can win a signed print copy of Bridger, and swag!  Who doesn’t love swag?  I personally love swag. 

Good luck everyone!

Thanks for stopping by!

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