The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass – Adan Jerreat-Poole (ARC review)

Title: The girl of hawthorn and glass.

Author: Adan Jerreat-Poole.

Format: E-ARC.

Publisher: Dundurn.

Page count: 320.

Release day: October 6^th 2020

Genre: YA, fantasy.

Rating: 4 stars.

*Thanks to Netgalley and Edelweiss for providing me with this ARC, all opinions are my own!*

I read this and then the release date got pushed back.. So this review is coming very early haha!

What is it about? (Summary from GoodReads)

Even teenage assassins have dreams.

Eli isn’t just a teenage girl — she’s a made-thing the witches created to hunt down ghosts in the human world. Trained to kill with her seven magical blades, Eli is a flawless machine, a deadly assassin. But when an assignment goes wrong, Eli starts to question everything she was taught about both worlds, the Coven, and her tyrannical witch-mother.

Worried that she’ll be unmade for her mistake, Eli gets caught up with a group of human and witch renegades, and is given the most difficult and dangerous task in the worlds: capture the Heart of the Coven. With the help of two humans, one motorcycle, and a girl who smells like the sea, Eli is going to get answers — and earn her freedom.

Rating:
Characters: 7/10
Atmosphere: 8/10
Writing: 7/10
Plot: 7/10
Intrigue: 7/10
Logic: 6/10
Enjoyment: 7/10
Average: 7 (which means 4 stars!)

My thoughts:

I have to admit I requested this book based on the cover and the title! I mean it sounds so good! Only after being approved did I read the synopsis haha, but that also sounds good!

In this book we follow Eli, a perfect assassin. I always love books about assassins haha! She got this assignment to kill someone, but something goes wrong. One thing that I missed a little is that we kept being told that she is this perfect assassin, but we never saw her kill someone?! The books starts with her assassination going wrong, so we don’t have any proof that she is a very good assassin.

In the first chapter we read about Eli failing her assassination, which was very intriguing, and really made me want to continue reading! But then the second chapter was quite info dumpy. Part of her are these 7 blades and this chapter explained what each one did in one paragraph. ‘the bone blade, good for this, the glass blade good for this..’ And here I was like wait, you expect me to remember all these 7..?! Luckily it wasn’t that important, only some of them, and they are named again!

Okay but moving on from the first two chapters..

This was such an interesting world, you have the human world and this world were all these witches and other weird creatures live. The witches are not able to travel between these worlds, but Eli is since she is ’made’. This is why she keeps getting assignments for which she needs to go to the human world. And learning about this witch world was so interesting since it was really weird and non sensical. Non sensical worlds can really throw me off sometimes, but for this book it really was part of the charm! I also feel like this world made the book quite original!

The cast of characters in this book is very diverse! I’m not really sure about Eli’s sexuality, maybe lesbian or bi, but we have a gay main character and a non-binary main character! Eli as a character was just okay to me, but I absolutely loved Tav and Cam! They were so funny and I just loved reading their comments and conversations!

I really thought this was a standalone, it wraps up quite nicely. But if you go to the authors page on GoodReads there is another book, with as description that it is the sequel, but it is not listed as a series haha. I have no idea how many books there will be in this series.

Happy reading!