Book Review - The Unseelie Bargain by R.A. Bowling

The Unseelie Bargain by R.A. Bowling

I found this book through a Facebook ad (if you read romance, specifically fantasy, I'm sure you know the type, where you see some illustrated photo of a hunky guy and there are quotes or plot points from the book being described). Well, this book may have ruined any future chances of me reading a book recommended through a Facebook ad. I had such high hopes and this book just let me down.

This book is about a girl Aurora who joins in the Unseelie King's competition in which the winner gets to work for him for a year. She only joins because her family is in desperate need of financial assistance and the winner of the competition gets paid handsomely. After winning, Aurora finds herself stuck in a bargain with the Unseelie King where she needs to do things she never expected. 

To begin my criticism, there were a ton of grammatical errors in this book that ranged from weird tense issues (like using past tense and then randomly switching to present tense) to straight typos (like "their" instead of "their"). I have a very hard time enjoying a story when there are writing or editing errors, but I powered through and read this book to completion. As for the plot itself, I thought that the story was nice and entertaining for the most part. The author did a good job with the world-building and I never found myself confused by anything. That being said, I thought that there were some borrowed scenes or aspects of this story. For example, when Aurora was competing and shot the crown from the King's head with an arrow and it got pinned to the back of his throne, it felt too much like a straight rip-off of when Katniss shot the apple from the pig's head with an arrow in The Hunger Games. 

I really wanted to fully enjoy this book but I almost couldn't get through it and had to force myself to finish. Because this is a debut novel, I might be interested in checking out book 2 when it gets released just to see what happens next (which should be very interesting) and to see if the writing has improved at all.