Fairyloot Adult #38: march 2025
I hesitated for a long time whether or not to buy the Fairyloot Adult box of March. The guesses and predictions for the book of the month were unanimous: it would be a book from an author I’ve not had a good experience before. Admittedly, I have only given this author a single chance, so was it fair to write them off completely based on that one – albeit very beloved – book? I hesitated, but eventually I gave in. Given the fact that the author is so beloved, there is a good chance that I will easily be able to resell the book if I do not like it.
The theme for March was Powerfull Legacies with a book for readers who love Urban Fantasy and enjoy reading about sibling rivalry and dangerous talents.
This book was Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake.
Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.
Or at least, so they like to think.
Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You’re welcome! If only her father’s fortune wasn’t her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.
Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he’s losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.
Eilidh, once the world’s most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she’d been his favorite all along.
On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?
Yes, this actually sounds pretty good. Full of drama and pettiness, with a touch of magic.
Time will tell if Olivie Blake will be able to live up to this nice-sounding blurb, because with The Atlas Six – coincidentally the very first Fairyloot Adult pick – she completely missed the mark for me.
The outside of the book looks great, as I’ve come to expect from Fairyloot. The cover got a completely new, and unique, design by @sukutangan.
At first I wasn’t entirely sure about this new design, especially since I’ve seen the regular cover so many times by now and I’ve completely come to associate it with this book. That said, I’m normally not a fan of character’s faces being on my covers. So the way this new design tackles that, while also clearly drawing inspiration from the original cover, through the ripple effect, is very cleverly done. The unique font and gold foil are also very nice. So yeah, at first I wasn’t really impressed, but now that I’ve let it sink in for a while, I think it’s absolutely great and better than the original!
But even if this were not the case, Fairyloot also gives their subscribers the option to use the original cover, in a unique color palette, by printing it on the back of the cover, as has now become customary.
The naked hardback has a very nice blue-purple colour and has an elegant gold foil design all around by @blanca.design. Simple, compared to what Fairyloot did for previous books, but very effective!
The cohesion of this edition is also top notch, with another unique spray-painted illustration on the book block by @sukutangan. This illustration is not directly taken from the newly designed cover, but it is very similar, which makes it all come together very nicely.
Inside, two more unique illustrations of our characters on the endpapers by @aliceblakeart, a bound letter from the author with digital signature, and bonus material.
Perhaps a slightly more subdued edition than the ones we got from Fairyloot these past months, but nevertheless very attractive and beautiful. Hopefully the book will now charm me too!
Groetjes,
Charlotte
