(Beyond the Faerie Rath Book 1)
By Hanna Park
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
This felt like one of those books where the atmosphere does as much storytelling as the plot.
The Scald Crow isn’t loud about what it’s doing. Instead, it builds slowly — almost quietly — layering unease, emotion, and fragments of meaning until you realise you’re completely inside it. It’s less about big, dramatic reveals and more about the feeling that something is shifting, just out of view.
What stood out to me most was the way the book handles uncertainty. Calla doesn’t step into Ireland with any sense of clarity or purpose — if anything, she feels slightly untethered from the start. And rather than immediately giving her answers, the story lets her sit in that uncertainty. It allows confusion, instinct, and emotion to guide her, which made everything feel far more immersive.
There’s also a strong sense that identity in this book isn’t something fixed. It’s something that’s uncovered in layers, sometimes reluctantly. Calla’s journey isn’t about becoming someone new so much as realising that parts of herself have always been there — just hidden or misunderstood. I really liked that approach, because it gives her development a quieter, more introspective feel.
Another aspect I found really interesting was how the book treats connection. Not just romantically, but more broadly — between people, between past and present, and even between the seen and unseen parts of the world. There’s this underlying suggestion that certain bonds aren’t entirely rational or explainable, and the story leans into that rather than trying to tidy it up.
The romance fits into that idea quite well. It’s immediate, but it doesn’t feel random. Instead, it has that same sense of inevitability that runs through the rest of the book — like it’s part of something larger rather than a separate storyline.
I also really appreciated the way the modern setting and folklore coexist. The story doesn’t draw a hard line between them. Instead, it lets them overlap in a way that feels natural, as though the older world has simply been waiting in the background all along.
Definitely one I’ll be thinking about — and a series I will want to continue with.
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Hanna Park
I began my writing career in the pre-dawn of a winter morning while my husband snored like a train. We could call my husband the catalyst. If it weren’t for him, I would never have gone to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, feed the cat, and sit on the loveseat in front of the fire. It was there, in those moments of wondrous quiet, that I did something I had never thought possible. I opened my laptop, and while the coffee went cold, I wrote a story. My husband had no idea that these sojourns to the loveseat in front of the fire would become a daily occurrence, that writing would become an obsession, but the cat knew. She knows everything.
I write stories that make you laugh, make you cry, and make you love. Thank you, friends, for reading!
In the beginning, there was an empty page.
I am a writer who lives in Muskoka, Canada, with a husband who snores, a hungry cat, and an almost perfect canine––he’s an adorable little shit.
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