Review: Legendary: Help Unwanted

Legendary: Help Unwanted by A.M. Mirabella
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story of a diligent Hero (paladin-adjacent, but not religious) and a fairy who offers to help in the Hero's latest quest: retrieving the ingredients for a potion to save her prince yet again. The prince has magical blood, and everyone literally wants a piece of him, so her task of protecting him is challenging and never-ending. There are multiple references to her previous adventures protecting him, starting six years earlier, when (aged 12) she cut off the head of a sorcerer who was after his blood.

From a storytelling angle, it's strong, with plenty of good emotional beats as the hero and the fairy work together and attempt to deal with their respective trauma. Plenty of plot twists and reverses, a villain you love to boo, and encounters with interesting minor characters, who don't feel as flat as such characters often do in books like this. It's a world that's had a degree of thought put into it, with an entire kingdom that flies, plenty of legendary creatures, and magic in all directions. The sensawunda is strong with this one. At the same time, the inner and outer conflicts are believable and engaging. Some of the concerns, and proposed solutions (like taking a vacation as a way of relieving the pressure from constant stressful work), are modern rather than of the equivalent historical period, but that helps them work for a contemporary audience.

Like practically every new book I read, whether from Netgalley pre-publication like this one or from Bookbub after publication, it could do with a bit more editing, and quite a bit more past perfect tense. There are a couple of apostrophe glitches, a dangling modifier, some ambiguous pronoun usage, a few excess hyphens and an outright misspelling, as well as a continuity error. I'll point all of these out to the publisher in the hope that they get corrected.

The hero works in what's described as a kingdom, but it appears to be ruled by a prince and princess with the support of a council of sages, which would normally make it a principality (a word that does get used in another context). Also, the prince and princess are addressed as "Your Majesty" rather than the more usual form for princes and princesses, "Your Highness," though if they're the rulers this is more justifiable.

These are relatively minor issues, and there aren't a great many of most of them (apart from the missing past perfect). Overall, it's a capably told, enjoyable fantasy, and I'll be watching out for more in the series.

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