#BookReview :: The Last Changeling (Faerie Revolutions #1) by Chelsea Pitcher

Seventeen-year-old Taylor’s given up on happiness. He’s just trying to survive. Haunted by his brother’s death and pushed around at school, he spends his days searching for a quiet moment of peace, until he meets Elora. The enigmatic runaway gives him a hope he’s never had—the hope of truly connecting with another human being. 

But the daughter of the Unseelie Queen has different plans for Taylor. Born into a world of corruption and war, Elora is determined to free her people from her mother’s tyranny. If she can gain the allegiance of the Seelie Queen, her mother’s loathed enemy, she and her rebels can crush the Dark Court and bring equality to Faerie. But to do that, she’ll need a proper offering . . . 

A human.

To steal a mortal, Elora must become a mortal—at least, by all appearances. And infiltrating Taylor’s high school is surprisingly easy. But as she becomes entangled in his world, Elora realizes something startling: inequality in the human world isn’t so different from inequality in Faerie. Students are bullied, ostracized and attacked for being different. And just like she did in Faerie, she begins gathering up the outcasts, encouraging them to take back the school. Now Elora has two rebellions on her hands: a quickly mounting mutiny in Faerie, and a mortal uprising inspired by the boy she’s destined to betray.

Elora, the daughter of the Unseelie Queen, has made a pact with the Seelie Queen to rid of the centuries old feud between the courts and rid of the iron grip that the queen’s have on their courts. The Seelie Queen demands a sacrifice in exchange for her help… And to get that from the mortal world, Elora must become a mortal herself. Taylor has troubles of his own… He has the weight of his brother’s death on his shoulders and family issues to tackle on top of High School and other teenage drama. When these two souls find each other, they help each other to find what they need.

The characters in the story are all assigned to bring in certain flavours to the story. On one hand we have Elora who brings along her faerie world to us. Through her we see the humans in a different light. She has been brought up to believe that humans are despicable, yet when she meets Taylor, she is forced to consider other perspectives. Through Taylor we experience something more familiar. Teenage angst and the facets of a dysfunctional family are portrayed through him. Their friends bring on the social stigma and LGBT issues to light.  The plot revolves around Elora trying to complete her quest by solving the riddle given by the Seelie Queen and Taylor’s influence on Elora. I would have loved to see a gradual build up of the romance instead of the instant attraction, especially since Elora is supposed to despise humans. This book is just the beginning of a series and most of it takes place in the mortal world with Elora as the sole connection. As such we get very little look into the actual faerie world and faeries themselves.

I wish we could have seen more of the faerie world instead of waiting for it for later in the series. I also wish the author had handled the Elora-Taylor love in a slower but developing manner. Overall, this turned out to be an average book.