Stolen Away - Alyxandra Harvey

This book played up to my love of all things faerie and fantasy. Not the cutsey thing of fairy tales and true love, but something a bit darker and more alluring.
<----Plus it looked pretty :D
It's a pretty standard premise: girl discovers family links to the Good Neighbours that end up coming home to bite them, plus some great friends and a splattering of supernatural romance. But luckily, some formulae are used often BECAUSE THEY WORK.
First off, there are our two main characters (that was a surprise - I was only expecting one): Eloise and Jo, best friends with lots of similarities but querks of their own - Eloise's quieter behaviour and Jo's fettishes for example. Eloise is the one with the faerie problem and Jo tries to help her out. These two made the story work for me and kept me entertained.
All the places and characters were wondefully described and it was really easy to imagine. I had a little trouble picturing Eloise at first as we didn't get a physical description of her until a little way in and she did not fit any of the stereotype images that my mind provided me with, but I got her after a few chapters. All of the characters seemed to have some sort of back story that was explained by the end and you could tell where most of their motivations stemmed from.
There were a few things that bugged me about the story though. First of was a major case of insta-love: not the couple-of-weeks-to-becoming-a-perfect-couple kind, the within-two-days-declaring-their-love kind. It was really only two days! The initial attraction between them was fine - from the description I'd jump him too - but how quickly it progressed to love was irritating. And there was the second case that wasn't as bad as the first but, again, travelled far to fast for me to believe it.
Overall, the entire time-frame of the book wasn't great: for three people who didn't believe in the supernatural they acclimatise to it all ridiculously quickly, even for book characters. It wasn't an absolute disaster and I still enjoyed the story but this niggled at me quite a bit.
In the end, I liked it a lot but there were just a few things that didn't sit right. As far as I can tell this is a stand-alone but I may venture to read a sequel if one appears.