Now that I have finished this book, I feel rather disappointed. At the beginning, I thought I was reading a pleasant, light YA fantasy. Rather too feel-good for an adult reader, in fact. There seemed to be too much time spent building up the characters and stroking each other’s egos while the readers wanted to get on with the action. Everyone was smart, everyone was witty, and they keep telling each other so.
But then the action started creeping in, the bad guys appeared and the story took off. Good conflict, not too heavy, but due to our connection with the main character, we cared what happened.
And then came the ending. I am not in favour of the type of serialized book that ends with a huge emotional blast and then stops dead, saying “buy my next book.” So I think it fair to warn readers that this is the kind of ending you are headed for. More than that, the book took a jagged veer towards the dark side, with a level of conflict that was completely unexpected. Suddenly it was not a book you read aloud with your twelve-year-old niece.
And that’s too bad, because for quite a while I really enjoyed it.
As a footnote, if you care about sentence structure and word usage, you’ll want to prepare yourself for a few jolts. This book needs a good line edit.
(3 / 5)