Difficult book to rate
3
By attyjames
In fairness to the author, it appears that this book is the 14th book in a series. It is the FIRST book in that series that I have read. So MUCH of what I have to say might not apply at all, had I been reading along, all the time. But I wasn't, so as a first time reader in the series, these are my impressions.
The book had a really weird and disorienting start, for me. You literally are in different worlds between the first and second chapters. And it never really explains how you got from one place to the other.
This book is hard to classify in terms of genre. It could be pure fantasy. It could be a young adult book. It had some aspects of an epic adventure. There was supernatural. There was also some reverse harem stuff going on. I found it interesting, but I would have liked some of the back story. I had a sense that it could be part of a series, but no clue it was the LAST book in the series. Having not been exposed to any of the back story or the characters, however, it was hard keeping up with things. A few clues, (or MORE clues, if they were in there and I just missed them), would have been nice.
The first 2/3 of the book deals with the mysterious memory loss of the protagonist. It is never fully explained how this was accomplished. The why makes some sense, but without knowing more of the back story, I am not sure how much.
I give the author good marks for keeping this a clean read. There is some mild language, but nothing beyond that, and I would not be embarrassed for my teenagers to read this.
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.
One thing that I found unusual is that the author made quite a bit of use of certain descriptions for how her characters reacted. A thesaurus would have come in handy. She used "quirked" as a verb, at least a dozen times...It felt like more than that. I guess it CAN be a verb, but it *irked* me how much quirking was going on. There was also a whole lot of sniggering going on. I know of one other writer who does this a lot in her young adult books. If I didn't know better, I might think it was just a pen name for THIS author. It is noticeable, because I have never seen anyone else use those words in that way; certainly not so often. It was a distraction, more than a detraction, but it was noticeable enough that I felt the need to comment.
My only other comment is that this was a pretty LONG read. I think it could have been 100 pages or more shorter and not lost much of the story. Even in key parts of the story, there was a lot of surplus verbiage.