Stray Review

This time I’m reviewing Stray by: Elissa Sussman.

Aislynn lives in a world where all women have magic, but if not contained, that magic will cause them to stray from The Path they are given in life. Aislynn has always struggled to keep a lid on the powerful magic bottled up inside her. Unfortunately she has an occurrence that sets her life on a completely different Path of being a fairy godmother. Aislynn constantly struggles to be and do as she’s told, but that becomes increasingly difficult…

This book took a while to get into. I really considered putting it down and never finishing it, but I trudged along. About a fourth to a third of the way into the book, I finally started to become interested and I didn’t want to put it down.

The synopsis of this book is, honestly, terrible. I expected this book to be completely different, where Aislynn was a spoiled, selfish girl who acted out, which caused her to become a fairy godmother. Actually, though, she couldn’t control her magic, which caused her later fate. This was completely different than what I was led to believe and I felt so much more for Aislynn in the way the book actually turned out than if she really was how the synopsis had led on.

I thought the plot of this book was good, but I wished there was a bit more explained earlier on. Aislynn slowly learns more and unravels the mysteries surrounding her, but I was so often confused in this book. Many of the concepts and idea in this book were unique, but I just wished they were brought about in a clearer manner. It took me too long to figure out different terminology (that wasn’t really blatantly explained) and to understand the reasoning behind a bunch of the rules in this book.

I really did like Aislynn as a character. She struggled with questioning the system that she’d lived in her whole life and I loved the changes that I saw her go through. She bloomed in a wonderful way and really found herself. I really wish her self-harming was explored just a bit further. That’s a huge topic to tackle and I felt it was almost just mentioned and forgotten. There’s so much more that Elissa Sussman could have done with it to add even more emotional depth to Aislynn. Aislynn was still a great character as is, but Elissa Sussman could have made Aislynn even better.

As far as secondary characters go, I liked Thackery and Brigid, but I found I didn’t really care to see any of the others again. I even was getting tired of Linea (the girl Aislynn is the fairy godmother to). All the characters, other than Aislynn, felt a bit two-dimensional. They just seemed to have a short list of qualities and traits, but that was as far as they went. They were all a great supporting cast, but Aislynn feel really like the only main character (at least depth-wise).

There was one event in the book that happens out of the blue. It is never explained further. Maybe the next book will mention it, but I think it is unlikely. It bothered me that this thing that contradicted so much in the book would just suddenly happen and everything acting like it was okay. After it, I enjoyed the book enough that I chose to not dwell on it further, but it really felt like a cheap trick to force the plot to go a specific way.

Overall, I really did enjoy this book. I wish that there weren’t so many little things that got on my nerves. If you can overlook things like that, then you can really enjoy this unique story. There really is a bunch of good in this book, but I wish it could have a bit more work done on it.

Lastly, the cover is beautiful. This was part of the reason I was so interested in this book.