Rating: 4 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novella
Ink wanted—no needed—to see the world. He loves his herd, but he couldn’t imagine staying with them, doing the same things, seeing the same places, day in and day out. So he left and traveled—untethered, a pooka without a home. Even Ink has to admit, however, while life as a free faerie horse can be exhilarating, it can also be lonely. So the night the infamous Magical Enforcement Division (MED) agent Aidan Callahan comes to capture him, Ink allows it. From that one encounter, not only does Ink get his name, but if all goes well, he may perhaps get a place to call home once and for all.
K.L. Noone has written a beautiful and sexy novella in The Pooka’s Share. I was awestruck at the poetic tone of this author’s writing; some of the descriptive passages were really quite lovely and made me feel fully immersed in the magical setting of this story. Told in alternating points of view, we get just enough backstory on both Ink and Aidan to realize that both have felt not only lonely, but also not quite in step with their families or own kind.
For Aidan, being a half-breed, with a banshee mother and a magician for a father, makes him feel like a failure in both worlds. He definitely has some skills, but not the amount his parents were hoping for him to have. Thus, he is a real disappointment to them and became even more so when he decided to become an agent for MED and squander his powers on being something as simplistic as a cop. But he loves his job, loves helping people, and while he often feels like a bit of a failure on the paranormal scale, he still gains satisfaction from doing the work.
Ink, who is nameless until Aidan offers up the moniker as a prequel to some very kinky sex, simply needed more than just hanging out with the herd. He has a wanderlust that drew him out into the world and gave him one incredible experience after another. But it’s meeting Aidan that makes Ink realize just what he has been missing—someone to take care of him, want him, and love him just as he is—kinks and all.
There are a few minor things that bothered me about this story, one being that the author sometimes referred to Aidan’s partner Elena as Len. While that seems insignificant, I really was confused as to whether this was a whole other character until about halfway through the book. I also think the author spent a great deal of time with Aidan and Ink miscommunicating and quickly correcting themselves so as to make the other understand all was okay. I understood this was part of the overall charm of their meeting, but after a while, I felt Aidan was being rather oversensitive to Ink’s sarcastic quips and instantly assuming they meant something was wrong. Because Aidan reacted rather intensely to what he perceived as himself making a mistake rather than Ink joking around, I felt it broke the flow of the story a bit.
Despite these small problems, I really do think The Pooka’s Share is a gorgeously written romance and would really enjoy reading more about Ink and Aidan’s adventures together.
