Review: This could have been quite good...
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 5, 2013
This is an author would a good story to tell... but she's sadly lacking in the ability to tell it.  I'm going to give her benefit of the doubt, as English may be her second language (after Québécois French), but if that is indeed the case, she really should have found a friend or friends to edit her writing, as 'Spell Check' is clearly insufficient.  I found at least thirty-five grammatical errors-- not typos, but actual errors-- including multiple misuses of direct/indirect pronouns, run-on sentences, and an apparent inability to consistently tell the difference between their and they're, to and too, etc.There were editing lapses as well.  Some were minor, as when Ms. Chester would forget that she hadn't told us something (or she had, but that the passage had been lost in rewrite).  Hayden's ability to see an otherwise-hidden bridge is a case in point: she was asked how she could see it before she stated that she could.  There also was a strange character 'slip' with Hayden, who all along is described a something of a loner, who doesn't have relationships with men, who doesn't 'party', whose closest relationships are with her parents, two women, and her horse... and yet the story is told of her playing strip poker with a bunch of strange (and soon naked) Scots??? Huh?  LMore damaging to the story line, though, is the description of Hayden's abduction and near-rape.  A significant amount of the first half of the story is used to describe the powers she's gained-- this is a woman who, when angry, sets fires to trees with a glance, and has already cremated a giant wolf, leaving only the 'smell of barbecue'. Yet, when a villain is about to violently rape her, her magical powers are forgotten, their absence never explained.  No editor would have let that go by.And yet, Ms. Chester has an interesting story to tell, one with a somewhat different take on the usual "magical world on the other side of the portal" fantasy.  In her world, the majority of the characters are shape shifters and are divided into "cats" and "dogs"-- I use the quotes because we aren't talking about the house pets, but rather types of large animals.  Cats include lions and tigers and panthers; dogs (the 'unseelie Sidhe' of her world) are primarily wolves, but also include coyotes and the like-- and bears and Minotaur-like animals are honorary dogs.Members of both groups are for some reason drawn to Hayden; 'cats' throw off their inbred obedience to their Queen to join her, and some 'dogs' make the greater leap to do the same-- this is clearly something which will be explained in the second or third volumes of the trilogy.  There are other plot hooks still drawing in the reader: the Queen clearly wants to meet Hayden, and while it could be a problem for the 'cats' who've thrown off their obedience to her to go to court, it is never made clear why Hayden shouldn't meet the Queen.  Early in the book, it was a decision that Hayden made, to put off going because she had another important and immediate task to do; following that, however, it seemed to be simply taken for granted that it would be a terrible thing for her to go to court-- bad enough to run from or kill the queen's soldiers who'd come to escort her, if necessary.  Does the Queen mean to imprison her? Syphon off her new-found powers?  Hopefully, that information will appear in the second book.Unfortunately, I probably won't read it.  When I counted over 30 grammatical errors in the first volume-- and I wasn't copy-editing but only reading for pleasure, which means I probably missed almost as many as I caught-- I realized that the book was simply too frustrating.  I plowed through to the end, but only because I wanted to know what happened to the characters enough to force myself to continue what should have been a 'pleasure read'.  This is the downside to indie publishing-- it's not that books that should never see the light of day are on Kindles and Nooks, but rather that books that should be put in the hands of a good editor and then published are forced to skip the "good editor" stage.  The story line of this book is as good as that of tens of thousands of paperback fantasies out there (I've read the majority of them, I think), and the characters, with some 'bringing out' could be interesting and like-able.  Chester does something interesting here-- where many authors emphasize the differences between elves and were-tigers and whatever, she just treats them all like regular people, with the same traits that people on 'this side of the Border' share. No haughty, music-loving elves here!  I admit, I might have liked to see more intrinsic differences between the magical races, but I'll give her credit for coming up with a novel treatment of the 'other races'.So, I'm giving her a second star for story-telling, with the proviso that, should she be able to get this book professionally edited, she'll likely get a couple more stars from me.