The Bibliophile's Bookshelf

This month’s Saturday Spotlight theme is Cozy! This month I have shared Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Kanehito Yamada’s Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and Chloe Gong’s Last Violent Call. You can find those posts here, here, and here.

This week I am sharing Feathered Thief by J.M. Stengl. This is a clean-romance fairytale retelling that came out last spring. This is a retelling of a fairytale that I had never heard before, and the author did an amazing job telling this obscure tale and making it accessible. It felt like a fairytale from start to finish. This book had a lovely romance and wonderful characters. There was also a nice and cozy magic system. I loved the different magic creatures- a little golden bird and a golden horse. The magic was well written, but not too involved, which I really enjoyed.

Stolen apples. Divided lovers. A bungled curse.

Young Princess Helena of Kielce despises her tormentor, Prince Kazik of Ostrów, until the day she realizes the boy actually likes her and true friendship blossoms. In time, their royal parents arrange a betrothal, but first the princess vanishes, then the prince, and the entire region falls under a strange curse.

Five years later, a girl known as Lenka the Archer tends a lonely golden-apple tree and wonders who she really is. Serving in the King of Trinec’s magical garden is a worthy position, but how did she and the tree come to be there? When golden apples go missing and the king’s two sons fail to identify the thief, the task falls on Lenka, who catches a golden bird in the act. Instead of shooting it, she receives from the bird one golden feather and a promise.

After the princes go in search of the elusive bird and vanish, the king orders Lenka to bring back the golden bird, the apples it stole, and the two missing princes. While disguised as a man and guided by a talking fox, Lenka takes on impossible challenges in unexpected places . . . and absolutely nothing goes as planned.

Will the stolen princess find her true self and her beloved prince? Can she rescue her homeland from its hopeless tangle of magic and mayhem? – summary from Goodreads

Book Review: Feathered Thief