Review: The Village Maid: A Fairy Tale with Benefits

The Village Maid: A Fairy Tale with Benefits by Emily Jane Buehler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars 

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

Everything she'd had was gone, thanks to the sodding revolution. 

Second in the Sylvania series, The Village Maid stars Avianna, the castle mean girl from book one. I haven't read the first in the series and clearly I missed a revolution started by a Princess, some peasants, and fairies. It seems to be a democratic revolution that hit the land where the royal ruling class is now more on equal footing with the working class. While it's obvious that I missed a lot, I thought the author did a great job working in little summaries throughout the story, instead of beginning info dumping, to give new readers a pretty good idea of past events and why Avianna is now working as a laundry maid as she bemoans how fabulous her life was in the caste. 

What would it be like to be with someone like Thorn---quiet and polite, and always thinking about her? 

In the beginning, Avianna can come off as a pill, she is constantly complaining about having to work and how she just wants to meet me a man to life bond with and have him take care of her while she sits in the lap of luxury. This surface Avianna slowly gets scraped away as the story, told throughout from her perspective, reveals more about her background and hidden hurts and truths. When we first meet Avianna she has just tumbled a man in a room above a pub and is thinking about the men she has been tumbling in search of someone to life bond her. She comes off very mercenary, when we learn more about her past and how she lied about her family background to get into the castle and closer to the opportunities she wanted in life, I found myself liking how she was a hustler, something heroines don't always get to be. 

A Fairy love spell, Avianna thought in shock. 

The author describes this book as cozy fantasy romance and after years of being burned by misleading categories, I was pleasantly surprised at how much those descriptors fit this. If you're a frequent reader of cozies, it will probably take a little bit of adjusting to how much “tumbling” is discussed here, think of this as cozy sex positive with a lot of talking about it but only a few foreplay and bedroom scenes. The cozy, constantly talking of tumbling, and how Avianna wants a big, muscly, rich boy, swirled together to give this kind of a immature tone to me, I don't know, maybe a New Adult feel. Avianna is twenty but she talked more like a high-schooler. While Avianna is looking for love in all the wrong places, she frequently gets help from her friend Thorn. Thorn is the quietly good guy friend in glasses and suspenders and oh, a fairy. You'll want to shake Avianna every time she dismisses Thorn because he doesn't have muscles. 

With all the men she'd tumbled, no one had ever touched her like that---like it was all about her. 

There's a lot of Avianna thinking about finding men to tumble so she can get life bonded, which will hopefully pull her from her current destitute position. This takes place in a medieval-ish time period (modern vernacular), so combined with lack of opportunities for women and Avianna's past of con artist parents that gave her a stressful and tense past, if you don't appreciate her hustler mentality, you can at least understand it. As Thorn helps and sticks up for Avianna more and more, she does start to see him in a different light but then childishly ascribes her feelings to him putting a fairy love spell on her. Avianna is a bit of a frustrating character. 

What if she started over? What if she had a blank page---what would she write on it? 

Mostly Avianna is trying to find love and then dealing with her burgeoning feelings for Thorn while all set against a backdrop of people feeling a bit lost after the revolution, pirates coming to town to enact some skullduggery, Avianna's parents making a surprise appearance, and some secondary characters to fill out the world and town. Everything here is more along the lines of soft, we don't get too in depth anywhere, the world-building or characterizations, besides Avianna. Thorn was really more sketched, you'll think he's sweet but he'll flicker out of your memory pretty quickly. I spent more time wanting Avianna to open her eyes to Thorn than enjoying them together but they did have some foreplay scenes, which sometimes I think romance can bypass in favor of right away penetrative sex (Thorn is a virgin but a reader!). I loved the map at the beginning of the story, every fantasy should have one and I enjoyed how the author tried something fresh with cozy and fantasy in the romance genre. If you're ok with not going into depth, some immaturity vibes, but looking to land somewhere soft with your reading choice, this would be good new pick-up.

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