Review of Fable by Adrienne Young

Fable by Adrienne Young

4.67 out of 5 Stars

 ***Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.***

Fable was a such a sweet little surprise joy this week. I hadn't planned on reading it quite yet, but I am so glad I picked it up! I had a high suspicion that I would really like this book because I really liked Adrienne Young's other book, A Sky in the Deep, but wow! I really had a great time reading this book and I borderline love it! This is the start of a fantasy duology involving: pirates, ocean exploration, lots of gems, and some power struggles. I know that doesn't seem like actually too many pieces in play, but just hold up for a second, I'll talk about that later.

Fable was left on an island by her father to fend for herself when she was thirteen years old. He told her that if and when she made her way back to him, he would give her what she was due. Very vague, very cryptic, but it's all that Fable has to hold on to while on the island because everyone is out for their own survival. Four years later is when the book starts and Fable finds a way (barely) off the island and constantly is facing new secrets about the people around her, trying to figure out where she can call home, and struggling to remember that the only person she can rely on is herself.

For me, I think I really enjoyed this book because it is such a fascinating environment and, consequently, character study. It isn't a basic 'no one can trust each other' setup. Truly, every character keeps everything to themselves. No one reveals what or who they care about. The only information spread around is the bare minimum needed to achieve an end goal. And the second any sort of personal or valuable information is known by an adverse party, it is exploited. So all the secrecy and isolation is validated because the communal environment really is that hostile. For the characters then, especially Fable having been abandoned, it means they can never actually have an intimate relationship. No romance. No family. No close friends. Nothing. And we get to see Fable grapple with that because all she wants is to work for her father. Not even have him recognize her as his daughter -- 'cause she knows that's never going to happen -- but just work for him. To have a job where she sees him from a distance. She wants that intimacy with someone. She wants a home, but this isn't the kind of world where you can have one.

SPOILERS BELOW

PLOT:
The way I see it, there are two main plots in this book, one right after the other. The first plot is when Fable is making her way back to her dad. This bleeds into the second plot of dredging the Lark and becoming a part of the Marigold's crew. And they're split like, 60/40 respectively, and I liked that balance.

In the first half of the book, my favorite scene is when the Marigold hits the horrible storm on its way to Ceros. Maybe that's a weird moment to pick, but I could just see it all so clearly. The waves were huge, the crew were literally clinging onto the ship and getting tossed off it. Paj has a fantastic rescue of Auster. And we get a wonderful, striking image from Fable's perspective of holding onto the mast of the ship, and suddenly it has tilted so much she is dangling over pitch black water. Part of the reason why I like this scene is because Fable begins to become part of the crew and works with them to secure the ship as much as possible. Another little plus is that there is a teeny tiny West/Fable interaction where West forces Fable to go down into the hull of the ship. I could be reading too much into that moment, but to me, it is a West/Fable ship one. :)

The entire second half of the book, I was waiting for some sort of shoe to drop. Things didn't go the way Fable wanted with her father, but she lived. She found a crew. They got the gems from the Lark. And this whole time, I was just waiting for the big oh sh-- where we knew what would happen in the next book. Because there needed to be one. The one that we got with Zola at the end was good, I'm definitely hooked, but I don't think the tension of the book was released the way it needed to be. That big oh sh-- moment could have been bigger. I wanted high drama to finish us off, not just in physical events, but emotional, larger picture, detailed connection to Isolde drama. And it would have been fine too because that's the end of the book. It's a cliffhanger anyway so a small concrete nugget of dramatic background info would have wrapped it all up perfectly.

What's the overarching plot into the second book? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure. The second book has definitely been set up. I mean, that cliffhanger with Fable's kidnapping. . . **cries a tear internally**. . . that was a rough ending. But we know where we'll be picking up in Namesake. What I can't pin down right now though is what the larger issue will be. I have small hunches based on things that weren't really explained: (1) why did Isolde have to leave Bastian; (2) are the gem sages the only zing of magic in this fantasy; (3) what exactly happened between Zola and Isolde; (4) are we going to see Bastian take control of the Narrows; and (5) what the $&*# did Saint mean when he warned Fable she was making the same mistake as Isolde?

So I'm very confused as to what could be in the next book, and not necessarily in a good way. I'd be okay with not knowing for certain what could happen in the sequel, but these questions that I have were all such small fragments that I don't have anything I can build a theory on. Not a reliable one at least. The crackpot theory currently spinning in my head is that Isolde was the daughter of some Bastian merchant or political figure and she ran away. This would make Fable then hella important to the Bastian people and somehow Zola knows she's a gem sage and wants to use her for her abilities. I don't know.

What I do know is that I would love to see Saint help rescue her. Yes, it would be super romantic for West to do it and for West to confront Saint about how he treated Fable, but really, I want to see Saint put everything on the line for his daughter and pull it off with style. That'd be great.

CHARACTERS:
Fable:
Fable to me is easily the most interesting character of the book, and not just because she was the main character. Like I mentioned in the non-spoilery part above, this is a harsh and hostile world where no one can have any sort of relationship with another living person. But Fable had love from her mom, Isolde. She knew what it was like to be loved and be able to express her love in return. And then in one fell swoop, her mother dies and she is dropped off on a random scraggly island by her father. So it isn't just that Fable is looking for human connection, she is filling in an ache because she has felt it before. And there are times that we see that tug, not just in direction of her father, but in the direction of West and the Marigold crew. All she wants is a home, and that is literally the one thing that is the most dangerous to have. And this is all just her development and personality, not including her role in the trader world as Saint's daughter or the unknown connection to Bastian as Isolde's daughter. So yeah, super interesting character.

West:
Dudes, West killed me. I had a super small inkling that he would be the romantic interest in the first meeting of him, but holy cow I could not have guessed how intense he would be. I absolutely loved how he stuck to his guns of being the helmsman of the ship and keeping his crew safe and making the side profits. That was great. What was even better about his character was learning about the knife's edge he was walking on with working for Saint and taking on Fable at the same time. And then there's the romance. Holy moley, this quote killed me (from th
e ARC, may be different in published version):

"And I think I've loved you since the first time we anchored in Jeval. . . . I have thought about you every single day since that day. Maybe every hour. I've counted down the days to go back to the island, and I pushed us into storms I shouldn't have because I didn't want to not be there when you woke up. I didn't want you to wait for me. Ever. Or to think I wasn't coming back."

Willa (and crew):
I'm pulling Willa out to represent the whole Marigold crew. She's important because of her familial ties, and she's one of the stronger connections Fable has on the ship (imo), but she really embodies how the crew operates. They don' know nearly everything about each other or even what they're doing, but there's such a strong bond of trust between them. And I know the whole area is crap and untrustworthy, but seeing how small this crew is and how much they care for each other, there is a small hope in my chest that they are different from other crews and they can grow to be closer to each other and more trusting of each other.

Saint:
I don't hate Saint, but I don't like him either. After seeing how awful this environment, I get his actions, but only to an extent. If he had kept a child on his crew, there would be a s**t ton of questions that would make Fable extremely vulnerable and threatened. I can buy that it really was the safest thing for Fable for him to leave her on the island to fend for herself. But at some point during the four years Fable was on the island, Saint became the most powerful trader of the Narrows. And in the back of my head, I can't help but think, really? The most powerful trader of the Narrows couldn't find a creative way to get his daughter off Jeval? And I know Saint was the one to send West and essentially pay Fable, but still. Get her off the island. And now, after Fable has found him, how far is he willing to go to keep her safe? When he finds out Zola has her, he better go after her in some way, shape, or form.

Zola:
Zola was a sleezeball I didn't really fully know the sleeziness of until he goes to set the Marigold on fire. But because he is such an awful character, I want to know more about his background because it would be strange for Adrienne to include a flat, greed-based-only character among all these other complex characters. There's definitely something there with how Zola was able to recognize Fable as Isolde's daughter, but I want to know what. I don't think we'll get any sort of sympathy for him, and I'm 100% fine with that, but I want a more complex yuck factor for him.

WRITING:
I originally gave this a higher rating, but as I went along, I lowered it because I have too much to say on the plot and the pacing to give it something higher. I think what really swayed me closer to the five star rating in this book though were the descriptions. Oh my God it was beautiful, so beautiful. I think I could smell the salt and brine while I was reading. I could see the wavy shadows of the sunlight on the ocean floor. Every action moment was perfectly described where I knew movement at the pace of the movement. It was really phenomenal descriptive work. 

But while there was so much descriptive work, I wish there was a stronger thread of plot between this book and the next one. Fable was very sequential, but there wasn't much else getting laid as groundwork for where the characters are moving toward as a whole. The stakes could be high, but they came in quick and were resolved quick. The greater tension still hasn't really settled on one distinct focal point and that makes it hard to be urged to read the next book. If it weren't for my emotional investment in Fable's well-being, I don't know how strongly I'd be inclined to read the next one. There are a couple of other small things that make me very interested in the next book, but I can't say the plot is one of them because there is no path in front of us to be excited about entering.

There's a good chance I have a bias toward this book as well because I love the whole pirate/ship life, swimming through the ocean, living off the sea thing. Honest to God, on my bucket list, I want to take a voyage (for lack of a better word) on an old ship with no electricity or battery/gas operated equipment. It was so much fun finding images for this review and getting to imagine living at open sea and diving down to the bottom of the floor.

I want a map. I feel like I say this whenever there's any sort of fantasy novel without a map in place, but I want a map because I want to be able to chart the paths of the ships along with West and Fable. How much fun would that be??? To see the actual path the Marigold was charted for. I would love that. Maybe I'll even do that on my own just for the fun of it! I also want to know more about the relationship between the Narrows and Bastian because it was hinted at in this book that the political tensions are shifting and will be important in Namesake.


Okay, I feel like I could keep going, but I'm going to stop because I think I've hit all my main points and this review is already HUGE. In the end, I would definitely recommend this to a friend and I think I may even buy a copy for one. Personally, I want to see some of the cold barriers break down between the characters, especially between West/Fable and Saint/Fable. And I want more tension building! There's so much potential there for Isolde's history and the political tensions between Bastian and the Narrows, and I really hope those things get played up in the next one. I'm definitely going to be reading Namesake, that's for sure! 

Thanks for reading!