New Adult Book Review: The Goblins of Bellwater by Molly Ringle

Central Avenue Publishing
TBP October 1, 2017
288 Pages

Most people have no idea goblins live in the woods around the small town of Bellwater, Washington. But some are about to find out.

Skye, a young barista and artist, falls victim to a goblin curse in the forest one winter night, rendering her depressed and silenced, unable to speak of what happened. Her older sister, Livy, is at wit’s end trying to understand what’s wrong with her. Local mechanic Kit would know, but he doesn’t talk of such things: he’s the human liaison for the goblin tribe, a job he keeps secret and never wanted, thrust on him by an ancient family contract.

Unaware of what’s happened to Skye, Kit starts dating Livy, trying to keep it casual to protect her from the attention of the goblins. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Kit, Skye draws his cousin Grady into the spell through an enchanted kiss in the woods, dooming Grady and Skye both to become goblins and disappear from humankind forever.

It’s a midwinter night’s enchantment as Livy, the only one untainted by a spell, sets out to save them on a dangerous magical path of her own. -Goodreads

This story was inspired by Christina Rossetti poem, Goblin Market (which is listed below the review.) Before reading this, you need to know that this is a new adult book. This means that there is sexual content not suggested sexual content but full blown sexual content with characters under the age of 25.

I was immediately sucked into this book. The story of goblins is something I don’t touch too much. Its not as if   don’t like their story, I guess it isn’t as popular within the channels I run through to look for new books but its something I am going to look into.

Anyway… as I said I was sucked into this book but the intensity I had reading into the beginning died. . . slowly but it died. It wasn’t as if the story was not interesting. It was but the author took a little bit too much time of having the characters run around the issue. I felt that the resolution was too easy found and there wasn’t enough fight or intensity leading up to the conclusion as there was with the sex scenes.

I also didn’t think there was a enough mythology in the book. I wanted something deeper in the overall story. I wanted more history and color overall in the story. I felt that the focus was too much on the relationships and not on the goblins their story, their end game or anything such as that. The story was fairly straight-forward and I’m not a fan of that.

Despite the story hitting a slow patch, despite the lack of mythology and color, it provide a quick read and it introduced me to a new author.

2.5 Pickles (for a good foundation)