Mieradome by Kate Hegarty

"My YA fantasy novel, Mieradome, revolves around a young girl named Amavia, who believes she is a human girl, but slowly comes to find she is a faery in the world of Mieradome. Amavia's mother, Anastasica, had taken her out of the faery realm and hidden her away here in our human realm, so that she may be protected from her parents' past mistakes. But that was not enough, the forces that be found Amavia, and brought her back into the cosmos of the Grandmother Tree. There she meets other faeries, goblins, Telkar dragons, and Utopisols. Slowly who Amavia really was began to unravel to show the truth. The truth, that she just may be the evil they need to destroy. This is where the story begins." from GoodReads.

Rarely ever do I pick out books that I end up not liking. I usually love everything that I read. Unfortunately, this was not the case with Mieradome. When Kate contacted me, I accepted to review her book because it seemed an interesting concept and I was dying to get my hands on another fantasy.

A few pages in and I could immediately tell how I would feel about this book. I kept on reading, trying to reassure myself that if I stopped, I wouldn't get to the great ending that had to be coming. My hopes started dwindling halfway down.

Although the story itself presents an interesting fantasy concept, it fell a little short. The characters, including the MC, Amavia, didn't feel relateable. I didn't care about her choices and I couldn't find a way to like her. I wasn't even sure about her age at one point because sometimes she would act like a teen and other times she would act like a child. This was also the case with the supporting characters. 

The relationship between Amavia, Caiden, and Garin didn't get my attention either until the very end, and at that point, I wasn't even sure what was their driving force and I couldn't relate to it.

Because of this, I didn't really enjoy the story. The plot didn't grab me and I couldn't get into it, as hard as I tried to. Too many times the story felt a little cliched for my taste and the use of words such as 'tip top' and 'huffed and puffed' made me tired. 

Overall, the story and seemed good in theory but it didn't grab me as I expected it would: it was a bit too long and the dialogue and characters overall didn't seem real. I couldn't find a theme to the story.

In one sentence:

This book didn't reach my expectations.

2/5 stars

*Mieradome comes out on March/April 2010