Hello, reader!
It’s time for another blog tour for one of the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA) 2022 finalists! Today, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on a fast-paced fantasy that is all about the fae: Haven by Ceril N. Domace! This was our 13th place finisher last year and I can see why!
But, before I go on, let me tell you more about this award. BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 15 finalists and one overall winner. If you are an author and wish to learn more about the BBNYA competition, you can visit the official website http://www.bbnya.com or Twitter @bbnya_official. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the @Foliosociety (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.
And, now, let me tell you more about this book!
- Title: Haven
- Author: Ceril N. Domace
- Publisher: Self-published
- Publication date: April 30th, 2021
- Genre: Fantasy, Science Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy
- Age group: Adult
- Content/Trigger Warnings: Death of a parent, death of a child, grief, war, prejudice, violence, blood
Book Links
Most people think the fae are gone. Most people are wrong.
Owen Williams wakes after a horrific car accident to find his wife is dead—and somehow turned into a gryphon—and his kids gone after a home invasion turned horribly wrong. Shattered and reeling, he vows to do whatever it takes to find them.
When a fae scout appears and promises to reunite him with his kids, he doesn’t hesitate before joining her. But she warns him that if he wants to protect his family, he must follow the fae to their city, the hidden haven of Tearmann.
With enemies on the horizon, Owen needs to set aside his fears and take up arms to defend their new home alongside the people he’s always been taught were monsters—or he’ll lose everyone he’s trying to protect
Author Links
Website::Facebook::Twitter::Goodreads
Ceril N Domace is an accountant, the owner of a cat with more zooms than brain cells, and a dedicated dungeon master.
As a lover of fiction works great and small, Ceril has been reading age-inappropriate stories since her father failed to pull The Silmarillion from her grubby little fingers at age five. As a grown-up accountant, her spreadsheet compiling gives her plenty of time to make plans for a fantastic world that isn’t plagued by balance sheets . . . and also has dragons.
On the rare occasions she manages to free herself from an ever-growing and complex web of TTRPG, Ceril enjoys taking walks and griping that all her hobbies are work in disguise.
Thank you to BBNYA, The Write Reads, and the author for providing me with a free e-book in exchange for an honest review! All opinions contained within are my own.
I had to sit by myself staring at a wall for a second before I could even think about writing this review because this book made me feel things. To the point that my son was a bit concerned 😅 But if that isn’t the mark of a great read, I don’t know what is!
Haven is a story that follows a family man named Owen Williams. Owen and his family are living an ordinary life when his world is turned completely upside down. Waking up after a car accident, he is told that his wife is dead and his children have been disappeared. When a representative of the fae appears telling him she can take him to his children, he doesn’t hesitate to follow. From there, he and his family are thrown into a world that they know very little about and comes with a lot of danger.
Where do I start with this one? Probably with the aspect of it that stuck with me the most: the characters. Owen, his kids, and all the major players in this book are so well-written that they come to life on the page! I will say, there are a lot of characters to keep up with, but I never felt confused or overwhelmed. I think the author did a great job of making all the key characters feel and sound unique so you didn’t get them mixed up with all the new names flying at you. I also loved how we delved into the various different species of the fae. If you like mythical beings, you’re gonna love this one! From angels to vampires, pretty any mythological creature you can think of is represented within this story. The whole concept behind the fae and their relationship with the human world is told in such a unique fashion in this novel and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Another thing I liked was the worldbuilding. As I said, each fae species is unique and the author does a great job of weaving in teaching us about the species with the storytelling. It doesn’t feel info-dumpy, which makes it easy to just sit back and enjoy it. The fantastic worldbuilding combined with the incredible characters had me so keyed into this story that a certain part left me a sobbing mess. A book that can legitimately make me cry is always going to be a winner in my book. If you can make me care enough about fictional people in a fictional world that real tears come out? There’s no way I’m giving you less than four stars. That being said, there were bits that kept me from giving it the full five, like plot points being very predictable to the point where not a single twist surprised me, but this was still a fantastic read.
Overall, I got a lot of enjoyment from this novel, even when I was crying *cough*. The worldbuilding is very well done and the characters are crafted in a way that makes them incredibly compelling. There were quite a few plot points that felt like they were supposed to be a surprised but weren’t, yet I still found myself engaged in the story from beginning to end. If you like fantasy with high stakes and tons of interesting characters, both fae and human, I think you would really enjoy this one!
Star rating:
Kerri McBookNerd 
Fantastic review!
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