Title:   Birth of the Fae: Locked Out of Heaven
Author: Danielle Orsino  
Genre:   Fantasy
Rating:   3.2 out of 5

The Fae have been abandoned by their Creator. Queen Aurora is crowned Queen of the Court of Light. King Jarvok is the King of the Court of Dark. Throughout the novel, We see Aurora and Jarvok each speaking with their councilmen about the abandonment of their Creator and what will result because of it.

King Jarvok proposes that Queen Aurora either stay in her palace, denounce the humans, and live, or meet him in battle and join Arceria in Oblivion. If she chooses the first option, the humans will no longer worship any member of the Court of Light, leaving all worshipping rituals for King Jarvok and the Court of Dark. She chooses war. During the war, the Weepers (fighters from the Court of Dark) have backed up the Light Fae to the banks of the Red Sea. There is nowhere left to go. Aurora hovers in a tornado made of water. She is giving the Fae a chance to escape. The water begins rising where the Weepers are standing. The Weepers are given an order to retreat. They march into their portal.

For the next few weeks, Aurora watches a group of Egyptian slaves from afar. One day, she sees Him, the Creator. She is upset that He answered to these humans, but not to the Fae. He had abandoned them and ignored Aurora even after she demanded His attention. It seems that He wants to be the humans’ one true God, taking away her livelihood and her kin’s mode of existence. Aurora channels all of her rage and hurt onto King Jarvok and the Court of Dark. She makes it her mission to destroy Jarvok and the Court of Dark.

I was intrigued by the synopsis of this novel. The fae were originally angels? I haven’t read that before, so I was interested to read this. However, I found the execution to be a bit erratic. There’s frequently no sense of time passing in the novel, yet in reality, thousands of years have passed. That’s jarring for the reader. To make that more pronounced, we’re thousands of years in the past–before Noah—but the characters use modern phrasings (“hired muscle”) and flip people off. This took me completely out of the story and made it impossible for me to believe in what was happening.

There are also frequent introductions of things/people, like the Illuminasqua, who appeared at convenient points without prior mention, as if the author either thought of a cool idea and randomly threw it in, or if she wrote herself into a corner and had to invent something to solve her dilemma. And the four bishops, who were barely mentioned before, are suddenly against the queen and doing things that don’t even makes sense. If the reader keeps tripping over mechanical issues in the writing, the story itself fares poorly. While I appreciate the unique premise of this story, it felt more like rough draft than a finished, polished novel.

Danielle Orsino is a nurse and a martial artist. Birth of the Fae: Locked Out of Heaven is her debut novel.

(Galley courtesy of the author/publicist in exchange for an honest review.)