I received this ARC for NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. A big thank you to Mary Watson and Bloomsbury Publishing!

"My mother left when I was a baby. I was named Wren for the druid bird. My first memory is of trees. I am an auger with a spinny eye, which is a curse, not a blessing. I am here to steal from you. I love peanut butter and running in the woods, but never with the boys behind me"

Overall this book did capture me into a world of darkness, magic, and treachery. Unfortunately, something about the execution of this debut was mildly off-putting to me.

There is something about urban, modern fantasies that I find difficult. The ability to inject a true sense of magic and fantasy into a modern, coffee- and bus-filled setting is not the easiest task. And sometimes Watson found the key to this, and sometimes it just wasn't quite working for me.

The Wren Hunt occurs between several different settings - the small village in which the magic is well and truly present, alive with rituals and old tales; the travel through the city, full of buses, cell phones, and typical modern coffee shops; and then Harkness House, where the magical and the modern converge in this old-fashioned art foundation setting.

I enjoyed and appreciated the contrast between the settings, however, at times it threw off the fluid story-telling and felt a little out-of-place and disjointed. In a modern world in which there was a secret magical conflict occurring, it seemed odd to suddenly be on a bus after finishing a magic ritual in the woods. The writing style was sometimes too jarring between these scenes to be comfortable.

"In the garden, I had the most extraordinary desire to put my tongue to the wet mulched leaves. I was surprised by their cool, refreshing tang"

Almost every character in this book has this big, dark cloud of mystery hanging just above their fictional heads. This is something that did draw me into the story.

I adored Maeve and her motherly instincts and even Smith with his gruff grandfatherly protectiveness. The entire auger clan were very homey and exactly what you expect from people in a village that practice rituals.

The judges are not all as sinister as you would expect them to be. There is a crispness and an authoritarian vibe across all the judge characters, even Tarc who quickly becomes a part of the very typical Romeo & Juliet trope. Which, by the way, I didn't mind. I appreciated the romance, but it wasn't something I was sobbing over.

But across all the characters there was always something not quite comfortable, which made it difficult to really appreciate the characters in an intimate way.

"The wran, the wran, the king of all birds,
On St Stephen's Day was caught in the furze.
Her clothes were all torn, her shoes all worn,
We chased her all night, right through until dawn."

There is a gorgeous creepy, unsettling darkness across this entire book which I adored. If anything, this book has some seriously great atmosphere. But overall, it was just a little too slow and incohesive for me to truly love.



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