Rise of the Cinder Fae by Whitney DeanRise of the Cinder Fae
by Whitney Dean
I published my review on GoodReads, February 22, 2024

i was granted an arc in exchange for an honest opinion, and honestly, i was mindblown by this!!

my only expression when i finished this book was, WOW. starting it, i wasn't expecting so much since i was also worried about the number of pages this has but it was so worth it to read. upon starting this book, i could really tell that this was definitely a cinderella retelling and the author was so straightforward about it until the end. i was ecstatic when i learned that this was a dual pov.

the worldbuilding was exciting. the characters are so deep. the writing style was addicting. the cinder fae were intriguing. the main characters, ellie and finnian, i adore. irina and azrea felt like my sisters too. i had a few realizations as well while reading this and i was deeply moved by what the mmcs had gone through because tbh, no one has to experience that at all.

all in all, the story worked and it clicked. i was left wanting and craving for the next book already and to think that this book is to be published yet is rendering me speechless as i have to wait probably a long time to be able to reunite with them again.

i love morally grey men obsessed with their women and women who learn just how worthy they are of the entire world.

This work of art was the wildest rollercoaster ride that I've been on this year... and I LOVED every second of it. I preordered a hardcover copy of this book at less than 25% in because I already knew I'd be revisiting Ashbury and Pumpkin Hollow in the future just to see Finn and Elora all over again.

Whitney Dean did a fantastic job with this Cinderella-retelling as an enemies-to-lovers, dark romantasy, arranged marriage with fantastic banter story. I know I may often be generous with my ratings as a reader when books make me FEEL, but wow oh wow this one would put all my other five-star ratings to shame.

Elora is the Fallen Princess of Ashbury has been put down all her life and has stayed kind throughout all of that, but what she lacks is courage, which she finds a way to obtain. She's a snarky little "toad" that falls in love with the prince of Pumpkin Hollow, who in turn, falls in love with her.

Finnian is the Prince of Pumpkin Hollow, son to a cruel king and disrespected mother, and brother to free-spirited Irina. I loved watching him learn how to love and trust in a world that has done nothing but forced him to give and give and give.

The Cinder Fae and the magic pumpkins were amazing changes to the story and I cannot (read: CANNOT) wait to learn more about them in the next installment. I am very grateful and so excited that this will not be a standalone. I'm not quite ready to let go of Finn and Ellie quite yet.

As I wait for my hardcover copy to make it to my local indie bookstore so I can go pick it up, Whitney Dean, please know you've now become an autobuy author for me. Please also expect further screaming from me in the future as I go read your other works.

4.5❤️‍🔥

I had wanted to read Whitney for a long time but I hadn't because her books intimidated me haha😆 ​​until I finally decided to read a book by her and I really liked it!✨

A dark cinderella retelling, here I am!👀
It's a big book and I thought it would take me too long to finish reading it but no, haha it hooks you quickly, like all fantasy books, at first it's confusing but as you read everything becomes clear, I like that it wasn't a heavy read, From the beginning it was very easy to read and understand.✨

I like that it had a lot of action, a lot of things always happened, there were several dramas but I liked that they were always quick to resolve, everything was very entertaining.🤍
I loved the characters (obviously only the good ones haha) especially the Faes, omg, I'm in love, and also Irina, she's very funny, love it✨, I already want to read more about her and all the Faes!🛐
Elora and Finn, omg, I love possessive men who only live for their woman and do anything for her, what a man!, 😏and Elora is a queen and with that ending?! I NEED THE SECOND AAAAHHHH🤧, I was really surprised how it would end, I was afraid that things would happen that I don't like BUT what I love happened!🤍

Well I won't say much but you need to read this.❤️‍🔥

-Arranged marriage
-Only one horse
-Dual pov
-Hate to lovers
-Faes/Humans
-War
-Found family
-Obsessed/Possessive (fmc/mmc)
-Forced Proximity
-Spicy
-Fated Mates

•Release: February 26th
Thanks Netgalley for the arc

What!! this book was amazing I smashed though this is 2 days! I loved the dark twist on Cinderella! the magic! the fairies! The pumpkins! This book held my attention I couldn't put it down! 5 star!!!

I would classify this Cinderella retelling as a romance forward fantasy with a heavy emphasis on family politics (politics might be the wrong word but it gets the idea across). The creativity and emotional draw wrapped into every page makes this chunky book a decently quick read.

Key factors I loved:
🎃 Delightful banter; much of it with a dry humor edge
🎃 The fae in this story are kind of a fae/vampire hybrid. Interesting and new for me
🎃 Well thought out characters - a lot of self discovery/family history revelations
🎃 Supporting characters just as interesting as the main characters - I want more Irina! I want Honora to get an amazing, and I mean amazing, next chapter (please). I am also interested to see how Cedric’s character morphs for the next book.
🎃 The visceral hate I had for the villains
🎃 Animal side kick
🎃 Mates
🎃 I also really like pumpkins

This book was a bit of a struggle for me to power through. I really enjoyed the first half. The characters are complex, the world is unique, and I think overall it's an interesting story concept.

Perhaps it was the pacing that was off. I felt like I was turning pages and investing a whole lot of time but not really getting anywhere in the story. There were a lot of characters and nicely complex storylines and plot pieces weaving together, but the Big Bad Guy king was ultimately just some dude who built his entire kingdom around pumpkins.

It did also have the feeling of a story built around a checklist of tropes. Enemies-to-lovers (check), he gives her a nickname (check), actually they're fated mates (check).

So overall I'm not sure how I feel about this book. I was a little disappointed, but at the same time it was no where close to the worst book I've read. I'd be open to reading the next one, but it definitely won't get to the top of my TBR.

Did @authorwhitneydean literally put crack into this book because I swear everyone who has read it this has been absolutely addicted, myself included!! I saw @enchanted_bookworm absolutely RAVE about this book so I immediately had to go and apply for the ARC. It has officially joined the ranks of my top top favourite fantasy books!

Rise of the Cinder Fae comes out in less than a week so jump on that preorder right now because you won’t regret it! Seriously! The romance is immaculate and the MMC had me swooning from the moment he stepped onto the page. I absolutely adore Elora - she’s feisty, and sweet, and loyal, and oh-so-naïve! And there are sooo many good side characters. My only complaint is that this isn’t a series (well.. it is, but it’s a different retelling and couple in each book) because I could have read a thousand books about Elora and Finnian!

Thank you so much to @netgalley for this ARC - it is seriously one of my new favourite books now!

This is really a must read for any romtantasy reader. I LOVED this book. After reading only 30% of my way through this book Whitney Dean became an auto-buy author for me. This book had so many of my favorite things all wrapped into one: a fairytale retelling, enemies to lovers, slow burn, dual POV, one horse, and MORE! While reading, I turned to my boyfriend and said “when I say I want enemies to lovers, this is exactly what I mean.” The tension throughout this book was incredible. My only negative experience was that I made the mistake of reading the last bit right before bed and woke up in the middle of the night from having the same nightmares Elora was having 😅

I am so looking forward to future books in Whitney’s Dark Hearts fairytale retellings and reading through her already published books later this year!

R E V I E W

Rise of the Cinder Fae by Whitney Dean

Advanced reader copy graciously provided by Undying Raven Press via Netgalley

☆☆☆.5

This was my first Whitney Dean book and for the most part, I enjoyed it. Billed as a dark Cinderella retelling but with enemies to lovers, an arranged marriage and the presence of fae, I wasn't sure what to expect but had seen enough character art and good word-of-mouth to spur me on.

This book starts off slow, with a lot of world building from the POV of main character Elora. It wasn't until we got the first chapter from love-interest Finnian a while later that this book really took off, so I would encourage hanging in there until this point.

Whilst this book may derive from a Cinderella story and retains some of those fairytale elements, it is the battle of sharp tongues and whit between Elora and Finnian and their slow burn enemies-to-lovers romance that truly grips you. This book is extremely long - unnecessarily long, perhaps - but when you're in the throws of their budding romance, you don't notice at all.

'If I had touched you like this the first night we met, I would've lost my hand instead of only my heart'.

This does change once Elora and Finnian are wed, however, as their 'enemies-to-lovers' trope veers sharply into 'fated mates' domain with a touch of 'touch her and die'. Ordinarily, these tropes wouldn't bother me; perhaps it was the overabundance of them in one story or the flick-of-the-switch to instant love in only a few days but something about this part of the book left me underwhelmed and uninterested. It also had a lot of on-page sexual content (again, I'm not one to complain about this normally), and I wonder if this was included at the expense of the actual plot.

What I liked about this book:

•The author excels at creating damaged but loveable main characters, and despicable villains.

• The enemies-to-lovers banter between Elora and Finnian as well as her relationship with his sister.

What I didn't love so much:

• The switch in verb tenses. It goes from present to past and right back again, which is extremely disorientating. Hopefully, this is a wrinkle to be ironed out before the book goes to print.

• That I felt like I was reading at least two books crammed into one. Too much happened here for one book and it could easily have been split into shorter, more gripping installments.

• That the faeries didn't have much of a role to play, given the title. All of Elora's actions were supposedly for them and yet they don't appear much after the intial few chapters. Then Elora is plagued with nightmares of a mysterious shadow Faerie who is slowly killing her only for it to be for nothing since she dies in the battle anyway. I assume we will see a lot more of the fae in the subsequent books since Elora is now their leader after they all bound together to ACOWAR her back to life, but still, if you're going to include faeries, include them.

• Finnian's willingness, and then actual request, to die for Elora. Whilst I had witnessed their bond growing and believed in their love to an extent, his sudden belief that they were the human equivalent of 'mates' and his refusal to live without her in theory and then in reality just didn't sit well with me. I had suspected they would become mates somehow, but even with that in mind, the way this was discussed before the events at the end made this premeditated and not romantic in the least.

•The mystery of the pumpkins. WHY were they magical? What did they do? Why were they trapped beneath a glass bridge and desired by the evil king? Why did they grow and expand after the bridge shattered? I feel like this was a detail included purely to tie in with the Cinderella-theme without any actual relevance to the story. Will we ever learn these answers?

was skeptical with it being a dark romance fantasy, a genre that I continuously find myself reading yet complain about so incessantly. This is a magical and dark Cinderella retelling, a world in which our main character Elora who lost her father to a mysterious heart attack was left with her step mother and two insufferable daughters in the poor and neglected city of Ashbury. King Jasper, who is a human ruler lives to control and cherish the magical Pumpkin bridge and the faeries who act as his slaves. Elora, ridden with grief and desperation to provide for her poor city, sets out to seduce the crown Prince, Finnian. She believes that if she can make him fall in love with her, she can make a difference for the better. By drinking from a magical stream to help her do this, she embarks on a journey she would have never imagined.

During the first 200 pages I struggled to see the end point of where the story was going and felt too close to the Cinderella story. Towards the middle of the book is where I started to enjoy it and it had some very unexpected turns that picked up that pace of the story, brought some life and individuality into it, and got spiccyyyy. Dually written POV where both characters were fun to listen to and I loved the side characters (specifically Irina and Dolfe). You could tell that this started as a standalone and the author decided it wasn't over about halfway through and created an AWESOME cliff hanger which makes me upset I have to wait for the next book to be written.

Thank you to NetGalley and Undying Raven Press for the eARC in exchange for a review!

I really struggled with how to handle this one... and I debated whether to DNF several times, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I stopped at 25%.

I cannot describe how incredibly bored I was for the first 10% of this book. I didn't care about the world or any of the characters, and I wasn't enjoying the writing style. I solely kept going because some of my friends over on Bookstagram adore this one and promised it would pick up soon.

So I continued, hanging on by a thread and some slight skimming. My main issues with this are: 1) zero flow through the story, 2) cinder faeries that are apparently key to the plot but seemingly have no involvement in the plot whatsoever and feel like an afterthought, and 3) the enemies to lovers trope that feels a bit more like insta-love with some added banter and tension to force the label of "enemies".

Chapters felt randomly slapped together, unrelated, and lacking proper story progression, leaving me feeling like they were written to check a box and not to tell a story. The faeries were presented as if they were added at the last second to classify this as fantasy. I wasn't feeling the attachment to characters, and with it being a Cinderella retelling, it shouldn't have been difficult to make me sympathize with Ellie.

Ultimately, this is a book with massive missed potential that could have been phenomenal, but just felt extremely underdeveloped and like a first draft. I'm slightly confused by all of the positive reviews because while this has some redeeming qualities, it is far from a 5 star read.

5/5 stars

- Cinderella retelling
- Fae and Magic and Glass palaces
- Fiery and kind FMC
- Possessive, tortured, sexy MMC
- LOTS of spice
- Dark fairytale
- Great banter and play
- great pacing
-dual POV

This was an unexpected gem and one of my favorite reads of 2024! Finnian and Elora are unhinged, kinky, and fabulous. Their banter and play is so genuine and fun to read, and their love is so endearing. This retelling isn’t predictable, keeping me glued to the page, chapter after chapter. THAT ENDING, TOO! The next book can’t get here fast enough!

Book review:
The daughter of a traitorous King, Elora has been shunned and forced to live as a maid to her stepmother and stepsisters in the broken and crumbling kingdom of Ashbury. She’s befriended the mysterious fairies that are slaves to the coal mines, her friendship making her a valuable ally to the cruel King of the neighboring Kingdom of Pumpkin Hollow. Her sway with the slaves make her a candidate for the handsome Prince’s hand. Their forced marriage and combined efforts to overthrow the King make them hesitant allies, and despite their hatred for each other, they can’t stand to be apart. Through magic, sacrifice, danger, and some undeniable heat between them, they work to save the Kingdom, but will need to give their entire lives in the process.

This book was an absolute pleasure to read!!!! Fast paced and a cinderella retelling with so many unique twists and turns, I couldn’t put it down. The tropes in this were incredible (enemies to lovers, marriage of convenience, magic, faeries, slow burn, possessive mmc, morally grey mmc). The slow burn was especially amazing. THE BANTER?!?! Finnian and Elora’s relationship was one I loved to read and see blossom on the page, and I ate up every single moment of heated touch and conversation. The history surrounding the world and the faeries was very intriguing and kept me hooked through the entirety of the book. I loved all of the different relationships and dynamics between the characters and their personalities were so well built and crafted. It was an epic love story that I couldn’t get enough of and can’t wait to read more of!!

So appreciative of this ARC!!

I couldn’t put this book down! It had a few slow parts, but I still loved every minute of it.

Jasper and Regina can f**k off. I couldn’t stand either of them. I loved all the Fae characters, Irina, Finnian, Elora, & Honora. Honora deserves to be free and happy! Perfect ending!

The world building and plot development were perfect for this book. I was iffy on it since it is lengthy, but it’s definitely worth it! I devoured the last 50%. I can’t wait to see if there will be a sequel.

This book is very well written. I felt like I was part of the story the whole time. This books hits allllll the emotions!

I absolutely loved this, it has so many tropes I love in fantasy romances.

Elora is living in a desolate town of Ashbury, living with her step mother and two step sisters. The Cinder Fae are her friends, but they're captives - forced to turn rock into coal and send to the Kingdom of Pumpkin Hollow.

With an invitation to a ball in Pumpkin Hollow, Elora's step mother persuades her to try and catch the Prince's eye to marry him, restoring them to their former wealth.

But can she act sweet and charming when the Prince is the most infuriating man?

𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀
This was so captivating, I loved the similarities to Cinderella - the step mother and sisters, the pumpkins absolutely everywhere in Pumpkin Hollow, attending a ball to meet the Prince, all magical.

I loved the chemistry between Elora and Finn, initially hating each other / finding each other infuriating, to falling in love (and still finding each other infuriating).

The growth between the two of them, both together and individually, was great - and I enjoyed seeing both Finn and Elora break free from their chains.

I can't wait for the second book!

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for this copy. This review is voluntary.

First off I want to say thank you for allowing me to be an ARC reader. It was such a great read. I was enticed by it being a Cinderella retelling but it was so much better. I would say it’s more inspired by Cinderella. You will notice cute details throughout that pay homage to the original story but Whitney has made this quite unique. There were so many elements and twists to this story I was constantly entertained and unsure of what would happen next. This is my first Whitney Dean read but it will not be my last. I recommend this to anyone who likes the following - Fae - arranged marriage - one horse - slow burn - enemies to lovers - dual pov - and some amazing spice :)

3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars.
What an interesting book! I’m so torn with rating this book because parts of the story were amazing and some parts I was almost bored to tears and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I guess maybe the pacing was off and I found a lot of it very repetitive and unnecessary.
Amazing plot and the bones of the story were fantastic just needed a bit of editing.
Also the tenses (switching between past and presence) were jarring to me personally and tooo away from the story.
While overall I enjoyed it, I’m not positive I’ll continue with the story.

There have been so many Cinderella retellings and this one BLEW ME AWAY.

The world building was unique but not overly complicated to follow. There were so many twists I wasn’t expecting at all and was constantly on the edge of my seat. Elora was a great FMC and the spice was spicing! I also fell in love with a few of the side characters.

And the EPILOGUE left me salivating for more. I cannot wait for the next book!

Thank you to Netgalley and Whitney Dean for the eARC.

Elora grew up poor on one side of a magical bridge while Prince Finnian grew up privileged on the other. Elora is determined to get Finn fall in love with her - even if they despise each other - in order to save her people.

Turns out she's a little sasspot who gets on grumpy Finn's nerves, but it's also the perfect combo for love 💕

🌶️🌶️/5

✨ Enemies to lovers 💞
✨ Slow burn ❤️‍🔥
✨ Arranged marriage 👰
✨ Age gap
✨ Cute nicknames
✨ Grumpy MMC
✨ Banter

I'd say the 1st half of the book is the slow burn, and then the 2nd half is "we're hopelessly in love, let's go get the bad guy", and I was into it.

I love the author's writing style, and she never ceases to hook me right away with her storytelling.

This is a standalone, but there's lots leftover for the story continue into a series.

* Thank you to the @NetGalley and the author for my eARC in exchange for my honest review *

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
🌶️🌶️🌶️ ( multiple open door scenes)

Enemies to Lovers
Arranged Marriage
One Horse
Found Family
Virgin FMC
Slow burn with Spice
Corrupt King

I really enjoyed this book! It was such a journey and I loved the character and world building. The MCs, Finnian and Elora, had excellent banter and chemistry. The secondary characters were amazing (I love Irina 😍) and really added to the story. That ending though 😍! I loved it and I can’t wait to see where this story goes!