Pleasant and gentle. To be honest, the illustrations weren't much.

I didn't get it. It was beautifully illustrated, and a cute story, but I just didn't get it.

This was a great adult picture book. This story left me unsettled, but it was supposed to. I loved the pictures.

An evocative story but it was, as the inner blurb described it, "unsettling".

Set in the hills of Damar. Maddy lives with her large family, her mother runs the farm, father makes jewellery to sell at market, Maddy is the sheep farmer, brother Ifgold going off to school soon. Her fiance, Donal, hired himself away for the year as a logger. They plan to live far far out in the remote hills and farm and keep sheep. One day a lamb gets lost and Maddy and her sheepdog Aerlich go to find it. A stone fey brings it to them (the shyest of all the fey). He is watching her afterwards, from rocks, and soon she approaches him, then he her. He smells of green things, moss and rocks. With very little speech, they become lovers. But it's a bad thing for Maddy. She becomes vague and unlike herself, uninterested in her shepherding, her family, anything but going to Fel everyday. He leaves stone Ms everywhere and she feels him calling her. But it seems he doesn't love her - talks very little, says he has family but prefers to be alone, shows her how to walk quietly around the remote hills - but she feels maybe he accepts her as something lesser than himself, like she does the dumb sheep. He never smiles; when she says, hopelessly, that she loves him, he simply looks at her with his black black eyes. When she leaves him he calls her endlessly but the Ms stop and he does not come after her. Donal comes home and they are lovers again straight away and she cries and says she can't stay in their planned home, he thinks it was his mistake and they go to live in the south.

Because McKinley never showed any of the love scenes between Maddy and Fel, the reader can't determine to their own satisfaction whether he loved her or not. There is no satisfactory resolution to their tale. Maddy wonders on one page, why did it all happen, and we're left to wonder too...

It was really boring. Yes, it was a fairytale, but the fairy aspect was dull and it just plodded along, without ever really having a point to it as far as the fey connection was concerned.

A lovely book with a captivating narrative and beautiful illustrations.

I was more than a little disappointed and I am a HUGE McKinley fan. I have no clue why it would be printed as a picture book. While the illustrations were nice, they didn't really add to the story. I also couldn't figure out how the story could take place in Damar. It sounded more like Scotland than Damar. I mean, there were references but I felt that McKinley only made the references because her fans/editors wanted another Damar book.

With this short story the reader gets to briefly step back into Aerin's world. Maddy is the oldest daughter who loves the hill surrounding the small farm her family owns. One day as she's looking for a lost lamb from her sheep herd, so meets a stone fey. Robin McKinley always manages to convey so very much with her stories. I don't know what the intention was for this, but to me it read as the hills loved Maddy as much as she loved them. And when she met a personification of those hills it filled her with endless joy. But as with the change from childhood to adulthood, it became apparent that to stay with the fey and the hills she loved, Maddy would lose other things. Adult decisions are so much harder than childhood ones. And to keep the family she loves Maddy must give up the hills that mean so much to her.

I love Damar, but this one just didn't do it for me as much as some of the others.

I got a huge kick out of the description for this book because it's basically the opposite of Twilight - the heroine falls in love with a magical creature but eventually returns to her normal human life.

The world building was interesting and I really liked where it was going, but the narrative could have used some fleshing out and the main conflict... never really seemed to amount to much of anything. There was a thing, slowly it proved to be a problem, things got interesting, but then it wasn’t a problem because it was fixed. I would have loved more insight into Maddy’s struggle, instead a bad dream and avoiding the hills seemed to solve everything.
The most well-rounded character in this is our main character’s sheep dog, followed closely by her scholar brother.

I hoped for another story about Damar, but these don’t feel like the hills from either The Hero and the Crown or The Blue Sword (seems to be somewhere between the two, chronologically). I don’t remember any mention of fey in the previous books and it felt like a very different world, aside from a few nods to her other books (Aerin is mentioned by name and someone mentions that farmers are beginning to plant orange groves in the south). The art is lovely, but doesn’t add enough to make up for what I found to be an unsatisfying story.

This is a book about Damar that I never even knew existed, so I was surprised and delighted to find it at our library. It is a short book, and from the style of the printing along with the occasional pictures, I can understand why it was in the children's section. However, I agree with several of the other reviewers - this book belongs in the YA section, not the kids section. The themes are too adult.

Robin McKinley's writing is beautiful, as always, but there is something particularly haunting or evocative about this book. For such a slight book, I know I will think on this one for a long time.