Gilded
A Rumplestiltskin retelling, where the main character is a story teller, an evil king is terrorizing nearly everyone. Ghosts are real, the fae are relatively strong, and the Rumplestiltskin character isn’t as conniving as I recall from fairy tales.
I thought it is well paced, and I was surprised that it had a cliffhanger (I should have realized, with a duology, that this wasn’t going to be wrapped up in book 1).