The Borderlands Princess (The Stone Circle Series)

Rating 3 out of 5

"The craving to be free, always just at the tip of my fingertips, even as I got older. The predicament of having your fate already figured out for you."

Princess Sorcha is destined to unite the war-torn kingdoms of humans and Fae, but her heart has other ideas. The journey to Fae-lands is a long one and her Fae escort, Lord Conall, is handsome, dashing and brave. Yet, no fae wants a human queen, and more war is on the horizon. Sorcha's betrothed, High King of the Fae, has his own secrets, and she's not sure that he is her destiny. But her handsome knight and her heart will have to stand aside, for she has a duty to her people. And they need this alliance. Once terrible secrets are exposed the princess must choose between upholding her duty or following her dreams. One mistake or wrong choice and not only will her heart suffer, but her entire kingdom will.

The book starts off by jumping right into the story with Sorcha on the way to marry the Fae king, and in the process she is attacked. We soon learn that there is a faction of Fae who don't care for the treaty that has existed for a 100 years, and they especially aren't thrilled about a human for a Queen. So not only does she have to learn about the world of the Fae, she has to be careful about who she can and can't trust. This book, being the first in the series, has a lot of world building. We get snippets of the background that are important to the story for like the first 80% of the book, with a little bit of romance thrown in, and then towards the last 20% or so we get a lot of action happening and some elements of the Sleeping Beauty retelling.

I had a lot of questions while reading this book and was a little confused a few times about what was happening. I will admit that some of this is probably just because of world building, but I struggled to follow the plot and story a few times. The timeline seemed to shift suddenly and randomly we had another POV thrown in. I enjoyed that Sorcha was actually in her 30's as I don't feel like this happens much with Fae romances that I have read. I think the author does a great job of creating tension and banter between Sorcha and Lord Conall and I wish that we had gotten more of them in the story. All in all I look forward to the next in the series to see what comes next for these characters, especially now that so much world building is out of the way.