Title: Ahe’ey
Author: Jamie Le Fay
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Rating: 4 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by Enchanted Book Promotions in exchange for an honest review.
Morgan is a dreamer, change maker and art lover. She is a feisty, slightly preachy, romantic feminist full of contradictions and insecurities. Morgan uncovers a world where women have the power, and where magic is no longer just a figment of her wild imagination. Sounds like a dream, but it may, in fact, turn into a nightmare.
The world of the Ahe’ey challenges and subverts her views about gender, genes, and nature versus nurture.
The strong and uninvited chemistry between her and the dashing Gabriel makes matters even more complicated. His stunning looks keep short-circuiting her rational mind.
Ahe’ey was originally released in episodic format, starting with “Beginnings”, the first episode which was released in September 2016. This book is the complete collection of all the episodes, bundled up in one book. Each episode has several chapters. In the navigation on the first page, it’s easy to see where each episode begins, and the chapters, so you can easily jump to the spot hwere you left off. A necessity, because this book is huge. 551 pages on Adobe Digital Editions. But the chapter navigation easily allows you to go to the chapter where you stopped reading (even if you want to continue on another device not synchronized to your first device – like I did; I read this partially on the computer, partially on my tablet). The book also has some helpful tools, like a map of Ahe’ey, and a royal family tree.
Anyway, that’s the technicalities. I do like the idea of serials being combined into a complete book. And the blurb intrigued me right away, so I was eager to start reading. Once I started, I didn’t really want to stop, but I had to take a few breaks because 551 pages is just too long to read in one sitting.
On to the story. Morgan is a dreamer. She’s a romantic feminist, an art lover, and she’s full of contradictions and insecurities. That’s how the blurb describes her, and it’s indeed how she comes across. She’s very realistic. Her actions too are realistic, and she could just be the woman living next door or someone you run into at the local supermarket. She discovers the world of Ahe’ey, where women are in power, and where magic exists. But this dreamlike world may turn into a nightmare as it challenges everything she’s ever known. On top of that, there’s Gabriel, stunning good-looking, and Morgan doesn’t know how long she can deny the chemistry between them.
While I enjoyed the fantasy aspects, what really pulled me in where the topics relevant for today’s society, now masked in a dystopian society but equally as important. Topics like patriarchy, like nature vs nurture, feminism. Part of the book reads like criticism on today’s society, and I quite enjoyed that. The plot is quite complex, and it took almost the entire first episode to make me fully understand what was happening. Once I did, I was fully engrossed in the story, but at the start I struggled a bit to keep track of what was what and how it would all fit together.
I enjoyed the story, the links to today’s society, and the characters. It’s definitely worth a read, especially if you’re a feminist, or if you enjoy reading dual-world fantasies with links to the current world, and that are not afraid to give criticism and demand social change.
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