4⭐️ This was a fun world that reminded me of the series Once. Fairytales come to life as a PhD student enters the remote island home of her best friend, Jobi, where all the story she knows and studies are real. Not everything is as magical as Kaley expected, there are a lot of twists and turns to navigate.

Synopsis:
To Kaley Arens, a PhD student and expert in folklore, fairy stories have always had a power and an allure beyond mere entertainment.

It’s only when Kaley accompanies her lifelong friend Jobi on a visit to his home that she realizes how much she still has to learn. Bellis isn’t the remote island that she believed it to be. It’s another world—a stunningly beautiful and seductive one, with its own royalty, its own rules, and inhabitants who breathe life into the tales she was taught were fiction.

Kaley’s presence is no simple holiday. She has a mysterious connection with Jobi and with Bellis, and abilities that may help determine this world’s fate. Tasked with locating a lost prince, Kaley and her companions—the enigmatic Tanek, a member of the Order of Swans, and Sojee, Kaley’s colossal bodyguard—journey through a land both thrilling and terrifying, where the uncanny and the familiar go hand in hand.

But in fairy tales, heroes and villains are easy to discern. Here, nothing is quite as it seems. And though Kaley is discovering that she can change the outcome of the fairy tales she knows so well, her own story is unfolding in ways impossible to predict, with a destiny she could never have foretold…

Thank you @netgalley @harlequinbooks and Jude Deveraux for the advanced listener copy.

I LOVED this book and the narrator did such a great job. This story was so interesting and the side characters actually made me laugh out loud. I highly recommend this book!

This captivated me immediately and I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. The narration is perfect. The weird relationship between Jobi and our protagonist is perfect. I love the setting. I love that she goes on a journey to defy a professor. It was all great.

I thought this was a really fun read! It had moments of seriousness of course, but it’s easy to get sucked into the fairytale aspects of it and the romantic subplot. The seriousness of course is that she’s on a different planet and doesn’t realize, lost 3 years of her life in stasis while traveling to said planet unknowingly, and realizing that she plays a large role in helping this planet.
I really enjoyed the levity that the bodyguard brought to the table; he was such a joy and a big teddy bear. Also that everyone wanted to essentially marry Kaley. I was a little mystified at how Kaley just took everything in stride— like oh a dragon? Cool no big deal. Woah that animal is extinct! How cool that it’s hear. For a PhD student I would expect her to think more logically— but she was also studying fairytales so perhaps it’s that fantastical element that leads to her acceptance. Really the only thing that seemed to get her was when she realized where she was and how she came to be there.
In terms of narration, can I just say that I LOVED the way the lost prince was voiced. The whininess was spot on, and really added to the character I think.
Overall, the book was a little unbelievable, but it’s fantasy, and it was fun. And the end is a cliffhanger that makes me excited to see how the problem will be resolved in the next book!

Thank you Harlequin Audio and The Hive for the listen!

This fairytale fantasy book had a very science fiction feel to it. Aliens, traveling to another planet, being put to sleep for three years to travel to said planet. It felt to me that the author doesn't write a lot of fantasy novels.

Immediate dnf for me and I won’t be posting a review anywhere because I really just didn’t like the writing and plot of this book.

I pushed thru 20%, but the writing really killed it for me. So many cool ideas, but the writing is too weak. I find that with audiobooks I am even more discerning with third person POV because the flaws seem more obvious.

I think the pacing really does need to be worked on. The first couple of chapters felt more like a prologue, a very rushed prologue. The training that we don't get to see, the intro of her animal connection but unclear what that means.

I will still give 2 stars for the interesting ideas presented.

Clueless FMC, way too much going on, weird acting charaters, and the writing felt rushed and parts unfinished. Gives ghostwriter, AI vibes.

What if you could change how a story ends? Kaley finds out while learning about herself along the way. Honestly I loved this book! I want to be Kaley and I want a Tanek please please please. Truly a good book and the narrator did amazing! I need more!!

Sadly I DNF’d at 60% - I reached a point where I decided that this book just wasn’t for me.

This story was all over the place. It read like the author had 4 or 5 different ideas for how the story would go and wrote them all down on sticky notes on a bulletin board and threw darts at it blindfolded to see what should come next. It felt like a lot of random ideas and not really a cohesive story. There was no real world building and it was overall just really confusing. I had to go back a few times and listen again because I just couldn’t follow the story.

The audio narration was great, I feel like their performance was why I got as far into the story as I did.


Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Audio for the opportunity to listen to this ALC and give my honest review.

I liked the narrator and that was about it. Nothing in this book made sense to me and it was SO confusing to follow along with. Not an enjoyable reading experience at all.

✨ ARC Review✨

Rate: ⭐️⭐️✨

I had high hopes for this book because I love fairytale retellings and sci-fi, but honestly, it felt like a chaotic mess. The main character, Kaley, just didn’t click for me. She’s a folklore PhD student, but she spends the entire book clueless about the very things she’s supposedly an expert in. She gets transported to another planet (not an island, by the way), and sees dragons, magical creatures, and people acting weird, but she just shrugs it off like it’s no big deal. I couldn’t get on board with that.

The plot also felt all over the place. One minute we’re in a medieval fairytale village, and the next, we’re on a spaceship. There’s no real world-building, and honestly, it was just confusing. The fairytales that were supposed to tie everything together didn’t really work for me either; they just felt like a random collection of ideas rather than a cohesive story.
And don’t even get me started on the romance. Tanek, the guy she’s supposedly into, is just… emotionally unavailable in the least charming way. There’s some sort of love triangle happening, but it didn’t grab me at all.

By the end of the book, I was bored. The characters didn’t grow at all, and I was left feeling like nothing really changed. The premise was interesting at times, but it ended up feeling more like a fever dream. The audiobook narration was solid, though, and there were moments where I thought I might want to read the sequel, but now I’m just not sure.

Overall, this one wasn’t for me.

Did someone tell Jude Deveraux that she needed to pivot because romantasy was on trend? This book feels like a writing exercise, not a finished novel.

On the positive side, I enjoyed the friendships formed by the three featured characters. I’m a sucker for strangers thrown together for a mission. But what that mission was exactly is unclear. I thought it was so Kaley could collect folktales, but she never meets with anyone to hear their stories. There is effort made to collect a prince - the task I thought was kind of a side mission but instead became the focus.

The entire set-up is pretty ridiculous. And the plot made no sense at all. I was especially surprised to discover after reading that the author is a well-known, long-time romance writer because there was zero chemistry between the main characters.

I will say the audio narrator was skilled and listening provided an entertaining distraction. There were moments when I was amused by the banter between characters. But in the end, this was more a hodgepodge of ideas than a cohesive story.

This was advised as a fairly tale retelling, but it felt more like every single fairy tale rolled into one which was a little chaotic. The narrator held my interest more than anything, but it wasn’t a terrible book overall.

3.5⭐️

This was fun and unique! I know sci-fi and fantasy get lumped together a lot, but for the most part they are separate in my mind. Order of Swans manages to blend them in a way I have not seen before with the use of space travel and planets, but also a high fantasy setting. It was a fun dichotomy.
I think the world-building could have had more to it as it felt like sometimes we were just supposed to know things. However, it wasn’t anything too major. I snagged more on the fact that the magic and and Bellis’ location were supposed to be a big secret kept from Kaley, and yet she never seemed to question her ability to understand animals, nor the fact that she lived through multiple fairytales before realizing she was on another planet. She just kinda accepted it like it was normal which was a bit strange to me.
I really enjoy Sojee and Mikos’ personalities and even their interactions with each other. I can’t decide what Sojee’s secret is but I feel it will be a doozy. (Apologies for potential spelling errors. I listened to the audiobook 😆)
Alexandra Hunter does a very good job with the narration. She has a nice voice and clear diction. I found her easy to follow and felt she did well differentiating between characters and emotions.
Overall, this is a very enjoyable and relatively easy read. After that ending, I am definitely looking forward to the sequel!

I’d really rate this more of a 3.5/3.75.
Thanks to NetGalley and Harlequin Audio for the ALC of this book.

I loved the narrator. I thought she did a good job. I liked the mix of fantasy and sci-fi. There were a lot of interesting characters and I am curious to see where things are going and what some secrets are.

That being said, the one thing that really bugged me is Kaley sees all of these extraordinary things, she can talk to animals even, yet it takes her forever to come to terms with the fact that she’s on a different planet…. It seems small but it was just ridiculous. She sees a dragon and doesn’t bat an eye but laughs off talk of a different planet? It made no sense.

The love was a little too insta for me as well, but I’d still listen to book 2.

DNF at 30%

I don’t know where to start with this, because I don’t think I understood what was going on. The characters felt strange and came across as inconsistent. I don’t know what the plot was, because the writing was really disjointed; it was like a bunch of scenes put together to create a story, but there wasn’t a story being told (example for perspective: I went to work, walked into a kitchen, met someone, read a book, etc.). There was no world building beyond us being told what’s happening, zero showing was involved. The narration is bizarre, where it’s jumping around perspectives and none of the characters had any distinct voice to make this a reasonable approach. The only redeeming thing about this is the audiobook narrator, Alexandra Hunter. I’m putting this one down permanently. It’s not for me.

Thank you Harlequin Audio for the ARC via NetGalley.

It’s so bad. Like really bad. I read the reviews before starting this book but I didn’t believe them. From the synopsis, I thought this was going to be like Inkheart but with a twist on fairytales we know and love. That sounds like a good book, that I would really enjoy.

This is about a college student, who is basically kidnapped by an alien because she is destined to save his planet. Nothing about the synopsis indicated this was going to be sci-fi.

I also first need to explain that I’m not a fantasy snob and I detest fantasy snobs. You know the people who rate a book badly because there’s modern vernacular or because the rules of the fantasy world didn’t follow the rules of our world. It’s fantasy and the author can create whatever world they like. But I’m making an exception for this book, the rules just don’t make sense!!! There’s helicopters and space ships on this other planet, yet they don’t have modern technology? The fairytales also don’t make sense on this new planets like they do on Earth. Like fairytales are rooted in real history but this new world feels like the fairytales are just plopped in. And then the aliens come to Earth to save different species from going extinct… I’m so confused about what the point of the plot even is.

At the end of the day, I feel like the author was trying to throw too many different things in one book. The book starts off with the FMC trying to come up with a new fairytale for her dissertation, and I almost feel like this author put that prompt into ChatGPT and got the concept for this book. Every time something ridiculous happened, I thought to myself ‘maybe this is a true story, because who would even come up with this’. I feel like I’m being pranked by this book. Maybe publishers post dummy books on NetGalley just to make sure we are being honest?

As much as I despised this, I couldn’t stop listening to it. Like a rubbernecker driving past a car crash. This book ended on a cliffhanger that left me with way more questions than answers. And damnit if part of me doesn’t want to know what’s going to happen. I’m sick, but good thing it’s labeled as a duology, so I would only need to put up with one more book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Audio for the ALC.

This book, for me, was just hard to grasp and follow along. The premise was on point, the execution was jumbled and a bit of a hot mess. It was random, went in too many different directions, and the protagonist, Kaley, is dim. Sorry.

The book took a little bit to get into because the MFC was not immediately likable so it was difficult to root for her. The discovery and world building is interesting. I really enjoyed the fairytales alternatives and coming to life from a different perspective. It's an average book but I can see certain audiences loving it.