I received a copy of this for a fair and honest review from NetGalley. I really found myself struggling to get into this book. It was not like the novels I am used to reading. I did not find myself connecting to the main character, but that happens sometimes. The concept of the story was a good just did not meet the potential that is could have for me. I know this is only the first book in the trilogy.
In close, the book was okay, however, it just it was not for me.

I would recommend this book for Middle School children since it feels like it's supposed to be aimed at that age group

I simply did not find this book interesting or captivating enough to justify such a long manuscript. It was a pain to get through. I think that if the story was shorter I could get to a three-star rating instead of two. But, in the format it is now, it is too much to ask of a reader for too little return.

I received a copy of this for a fair and honest review. I found myself struggling to get into his book. It was not like the novels I am used to reading. I did not find myself connecting to the main character, but that happens sometimes. The concept of the story was a good just did not meet the potential that is could have for me. I know this is only the first book in the trilogy.

For me, THE CRYSTAL KEY is worth 4.5 stars!

Let's start with the cover. I love it, actually, I don't want to sound bias but I am a huge fan of mixed media artworks and the way the artist illustrated the book cover impacted the high grades I gave this book.

Next, the story is interesting. I am really into books with highly-brainstormed history and the first thing I saw while opening the pages of this book is a MAP and yes, from that moment, I knew that I will be so into this book. This rich history makes sense because overall, the book provided me a great ride with all the thrilling adventures, great character developments, and unexpected twists and turns. This is super great!

This review is not possible without Robert Gronewold's patiencs in finishing this book. With this, I am giving you 5 Thumbs up! 👍👍👍👍👍

Thoughts and Plot

Honestly, this book took some work for me to get into...the beginning is hard as the story was a bit flat and uninteresting. I struggled for days to get through the beginning and to the better stuff, which was about 20-25% of the way in, so after the first 100ish page...it's 400 pages long.

This book, as a result, was not really my cup of tea. I generally like a book that grabs you and pulls you in immediately (and if it's 400 pages, 375 of those pages better be good).

To start, there is some terminology that you must become familiar with. I get that this is to better get across the point that this is not the Earth/universe as we know it, but a completely different place in time...that said, it could have been scaled down just a bit.

The characters all acted as though they were between the ages of 12 to 14 depending on the scenario. They are 16 years old...so....yeah. I also couldn't really connect to them. Felicity was nice enough, but I didn't feel that draw that makes you love a character.

I also could have done without the love triangle.

What really pulled this book back from the brink of dnf, for me, was when Felicity winds up in the Dark. Once I reached this point I felt like the story significantly improved. Problem was, I had to plod through other stuff the get there and even then it had some slow parts. I bet 50 pages could be cut out of this book without significantly altering the story-line.

That said, I enjoyed the Dark because Felicity was in imminent danger with only a bit of training and a magic key to aid her. I'm a sucker for a main character facing danger they are not well equipped to handle.

Conclusion

The Crystal Key has a very slow start that needs some willpower put into it in order to get through in order to get into the good stuff. The characters act a little younger than they are supposed to be and I honestly didn't really connect to them as I would have liked too.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this novel. It took me a little while to get into the story because it was a completely different world from any I have previously read. The concepts were scary and intriguing all at once. Half of the time I was not sure if I wanted to put the book down permanently because I was scared to keep reading. Ultimately, however, I could not put it down because I NEEDED to know what happens next.

The characters and the world were well developed with lots of interesting twists and turns.

This trilogy has amazing potential. I truly cannot wait until book 2 is available. Since the first book ended on a cliffhanger, I need to know what happens next. I hope the next book will be available soon.

If you have a chance to read this book, I definitely recommend it... especially if you like dark books.

Happy Reading!

Review posted on Goodreads; Amazon; and Twitter

The story was good and I found it to be unique and well written but I wasn't aware this was a 400 page e-book and I just can't read for long periods of time on my tiny phone. I'll try to pick this book up again when my library gets it.
Rating so far: 3.5 stars

This is the beginning of an epic tale. You have a world where the sun doesn't shine anymore. They use fountains to provide light. The dark hides monsters. And some people have magic...

Diamond Book Distributors and Net Galley allowed me to read this book for review. It has been published and you can grab a copy now.

I was impressed by this book. The author writes a well-bodied story with lots of action, some characters have taken on animal characterisitics, and the main character is young girl just beginning her career as a Turnkey. It's unfortunate that she is caught up in the Mayor's big announcement about a new portal to move to other cities still alive and not overtaken by the dark. A horror attacks them in the tunnel and she falls into the dark...

With a bunny rabbit, a teddy bear and a huge spider who are all human or at least used to be, the adventure gets dark. The teddy bear is friendly but the others are not. When everything in the dark is trying to eat her or kill her, it's not looking good for Felicity. But she runs into a boy who helps her escape. His name is Tobin. They share many adventures together and take turns saving the other one's life. Tobin has dark powers.

There's a lot going on and Felicity learns more about what her key can do to protect them. Tobin admits he doesn't remember his past.

The next one in this series will be interesting as well, I'm sure. Felicity has two boys she loves. How will she pick one?

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher

This book was overall decently well-written from a technical perspective and it started out quite engaging, but as I read on, I found it more and more slipping into the worn-out mold of young adult fiction: the perky best friend who is either gay or a female. In this case it was a female named Margo who was obsessed, of course, with fashion. There was the trope of the girl (in this case the oddly-named Felicity Bough) finding her new and great magical power and then being thrown into the threat or clutches of evil. There was the tiresome love-triangle with the reliable trustworthy boy-next-door versus the so-gritty-he's-really-animated-sandpaper bad boy who rescues her. That's what actually turned me off the story. Not so much the ultra-predictable bad boy as the fact that this girl who was initially shown to be so strong, was rescued and thereby was rendered into nothing more than a simpering acolyte of the thoroughly nauseating bad boy.

Evidently like other reviewers, I initially thought this was a graphic novel. It is not. It's a ~400 page tome of pure text, which is way too long. The story revolves around a world which is evidently ours but projected into a future where evil has become so pervasive that even the sun has gone out. What keeps the planet alive are these inexplicable well-springs of light which fountain-up from various places on the planet, But, just like in The Never-Ending Story movie, the dark is encroaching upon the planet piece-by-piece and no one seems to be interested in doing anything about it.

This world is predictably exactly like the USA, except for the magic and the asinine transportation, which seems (for no reason I was given in the fifty percent of this novel that I read) to be based on animals. Cars are tigers and stallions, buses are bears, cargo transportation is elephants, and so on. I was rather surprised not to see the cat bus from the anime Totoro. These are not real animals, but machines named after them and which apparently have some animal traits, but the description was so vague as to leave these things a mystery. They do evidently have wheels, so I didn't get the animal reference at all. None of this made any sense to me; it wasn't entertaining or amusing. Quite the opposite: it increasingly became an irritant in short order.

Someone at Chapterhouse Publishing needed to read this because there were multiple problems with the text. In general it was not awful by any means, and spelling and grammar were fine as a general rule, but there were some bizarre oddities which ought to have been caught by an editor if not by the author himself. For example, on page 48 I read "...then is shot down and dived...." I assume the author meant, 'then it shot down'. A little later I encountered, "...verdant shade of green" on page 73. Verdant actually means green, so this is a tautology. On page 117, I read "...plain stone brick wall...." It's either brick or it's stone; the two are not the same. This is maybe a case where the author started out using one and changed to the other, but forgot to delete the one they were trading out for the other. We've all done that!

On page 128 there was a mistake of using clamored instead of clambered as in "...clamored over the old blocks....' Clamor is to make a noise, whereas clamber is to climb over. I suppose one could say that clambering over the rocks was causing a clamor, but it really doesn't make a lot of sense to do that. On the next page I read, "...who knew what something bigger could do." which ended in a period instead of a question mark. I encountered a common error on page 134, where I read "She tread quietly...." The past tense of tread is 'trod', not tread, and certainly not 'treaded' which I've actually read in more than one novel.

On page 153, I read, "...two large trees that created the top of the hill" I don't get what that's supposed to mean. The trees don't create the top of the hill; they might sit atop it or surmount it. They might even furnish it, but they don't create it. In a part of the novel where Felicity is sitting in a machine I read "...two throttles sat upright ready for steering." Nope! Throttles control speed. They don't control steering, unless the direction is also controlled by the thrust, but since this was a land vehicle, not a water or space vessel, that seemed unlikely, especially since Felicity didn't know how to drive it. Finally on page 156, I read, "I'm hungry too," this speech was followed by the word 'returned' I think it was intended to be 'he returned', as in he spoke back to her. I'm guessing by how often I was discovering these that they didn't end on that page, but that's what I found in as far as I wanted to read in this novel.

In terms of overall formatting, I once again find myself having to beg authors and publishers to have some consideration for trees. This book had very wide margins on all four edges, constituting, by my rough estimate, some twenty-five percent of the page. If the book is issued only in electronic format, this isn't such an issue (although longer novels eat up more energy to transmit over the Internet), but for a book that might go to a long print run, serious consideration needs to be given to how many trees you're going to slaughter in this era of runaway climate change. No one wants to read a novel where the text is jammed together over the entire page, but if the margins had been even slightly less generous, the book would have been shorter and eaten up less paper.

Chapter one didn't actually begin until page fifteen and it ended on page 400. Some of those fifteen pages could have been also dispensed with, instead of rigidly and blindly conforming to antiquated publishing rules created when no one gave a damn about trees and climate change. I found it ironic that the encroaching evil upon which this author discourses is actually upon us (albeit in a different form from the one he writes of), and yet publishers and authors perpetuate their blithe (or blithering) blindness to it.

If these story had been shorter, less 'maiden in distress', and the bad boy third leg of the tired love triangle been dispensed with, this would have been a lot better. In faith, methinks it too low for a high praise, too long for a short praise and too little inventive for an imaginative praise. Only this commendation I can afford it: that were it other than it is, it is unhandsome; and being no other but as it is, I cannot recommend it.

*thank you to Netgalley and Diamond Book Distributors for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*

3 stars.

Took a but to get into this, so I was forcing my way through it and it paid off. It started to eventually get better and more interesting. I've read a quite a few good middle grade adventure books and this holds itself up among them. It's a good fantasy story and I really like the world building. The cover for this is amazing. I did think it was a graphic novel which is why I originally requested it so was disappointed to find out it was a standard novel. I think this would be better as a graphic novel. I'd love to see it as one, but this was still worth reading.

It was beyond a nightmare. She had run through the mirrorway, and by some horrible luck gone down one of the lost ways. A Mirrorgate, lost in the Dark, abandoned and unattended, just waiting to claim someone.

I had a hard time getting into this book at the beginning. The story moved slowly and was uninteresting, as were the characters. I was about 25% into the story before it finally took off.

When the main character, Felicity, unknowingly ends up in the Dark that is when the story comes alive. By this point I didn’t want to put it down. The Dark is a land where it is eternally dark. It is filled with monstrous Horrors that end up hunting her.

She is armed only with a magical key and a weeks worth a training. Her inexperience shows in the ways she trys to yield her power. It’ll be interesting to find out what she is capable of doing. I look forward to the next books.

*I would like to thank Diamond Book Distributors, Robert Gronewold and NetGalley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.*

I really enjoyed this adventure story. The setting is so rich and the creatures so fascinating that it made up for some of the other story elements that felt a bit lacking. I felt like we don't know the main character well enough to know why she would embark on this journey, other than her professor, whom she just met, asked her to. He's been a legend in her life but it still seemed strange that she would just drop everything and go. I'm glad she does though! The adventure and some of the creatures she meets reminded me a lot of Lewis Carroll, only a bit less drug-fueled. I loved that the Dark twisted them in ways that fit who the person was before the Dark took over and made them monsters. This book was one that I couldn't put down after about 80 pages, despite some lack of character development. I do feel that it ended a bit too abruptly but, maybe somewhat because of this, I look forward to the rest of the trilogy. There were a few cuss words and a bit of violence (she is going off to fought monsters after all) so I'd say this is more for pre-teens and up, depending on the kid. Overall, I do think this is worth the read and, again, I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

I would like to thank the publisher, author, and Netgalley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

What drew my attention about The Crystal Key first was that gorgeous cover. I love these kind of covers and it almost looked like it was a graphic novel. But it for sure was a 400 pages novel.

The thing about The Crystal Key is that it starts out as so many other books do. We follow a main girl who has lost both her parents. She is being raised by a family friend (who is a good guardian at least) but has been keeping something from her. She has powers and her guardian is opposed to it (the reason is a bit flimsy to be honest). She starts training. That is the basic start. It is hard to move on from something like that. It tries to do this but the middle lagged and the characters couldn’t quite stand out.

World building wise I feel that it did have something very interesting and new. However it lacked very much in explanations. It felt like a very rough idea that wasn’t fully fleshed out in details in the actual story. It took me a long time to get a good grip on the wellspring, horror and turnkey bits. I just needed our main character to explain a bit more on it. It wasn’t like we were getting a huge bunch of other information or that things were that intricate. Certain things were also named differently, like the days and day and night itself were called different too. Yet I got the idea this was more so set in our world somehow? The idea of the wellsprings itself and the plot (and perhaps possible plot as I have ideas) are interesting. I’m curious in that regard to find out more.

As said, the characters couldn’t quite stand out. Don’t get me wrong, they were likeable. Felicitiy is a strong willed young girl who is willing to stand up for what she wants. She is relatively smart, but a tad impulsive on the heroics. But I still felt I was only scratching the surface with her. Like there was still a wall between us. I also have to admit that I get the feeling in parts that our characters were younger than 16, a lot and I can’t help but wonder if maybe this could have been better off as a middle grade writing wise. I just could not shake that feeling.

And yet there was a love triangle in the middle that I was best not pleased with. Don’t get me wrong, I can see her with both guys. But I initially thought that there was a cute relationship being set up there and then we get thrown this triangle with some not sharing and someone being the other person. And just no, so much no. The book did not need that.

Having said all of this however, I would like to read on with this series in the future.

This wasn't necessarily awful, I just feel like it was the wrong book at the wrong time. Maybe if I was in a different mood it could have been a 3 star book, but I just couldn't get into right now. Also, and this is totally on me, I requested it thinking it was a graphic novel because the publisher that listed it has always ONLY done graphic novels as far as I know and then suddenly I had this huge 400 page book that I had to make time for.

It definitely had some interesting world building, although I think it fell into the trap that a lot of SFF books get caught in where the author makes up too many weird terms for things so that the world will seem more different than ours but it just makes the story read awkwardly in my opinion. Despite the interesting world, I never really connected with any of the characters and honestly they seemed a bit young to me. I know this is supposed to be YA and they're 16 but I feel like it would have worked better if they were aged down to 13ish and this was a middle grade novel instead.

I would have also liked to see about 100 pages cut out as well because to me it drags on forever in spots, and maybe add in a few illustrations because I really like the descriptions of the world and I absolutely love the cover so I think that would have been fun. Like I said, this would probably be enjoyable for a lot of people, but I think this is one of those YA novels that actually needs to be read only by teens [or maybe even younger] and doesn't translate well to adults.

Clicked 'read now' for this title by mistake - the publishing house involved rarely does prose on netgalley. What I found looked a decent-enough teen fantasy, although the light and dark metaphor had all the hallmarks of being overworn. I couldn't get my head around the Mirrorways and suchlike, but the rest of the world-building seemed better. As I wasn't in the mood for part one of a lengthy prose trilogy I passed - so average rating given. The only problem with what I read was the poor proof-reading.