Review: Lack of depth and subtlety makes for flat story
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 04 19, 2013
This is not a good story.  At best it is a trashy romance with a paper facade of plot and characters, at worse it's just a trashy romance.  The plot is very difficult to get into because the very first thing the story does is to club you repeatedly like a baby seal without any notion of subtlety.  The queen is bad and hates her daughter.  We know this because we're first told, then shown, over and over and over again in the most overt display of flat one dimensional character I've seen in a while.  Followed by the prince, mister un-charming, who is displayed to have no redeeming qualities what so ever and seems to be in a competition with the queen to see who can be the most shallow character.  I don't mean this as a personality flaw on the characters, but rather the writing of this book.  Followed by the good guys, knight in shinning armor who enters into constant pissing contests with the queen and prince and only manages to expose these characters for what they are - really poorly written straw men.  There are no moral dilemmas, no shades of grey, no ambiguity.  None.  What so ever.  The supporting characters come in two types, romantic interests (the men of courting age) and extras (everyone else).  We're told the princess has a female friend, Olivia, but in practice this character is less than a ghost.  Finally this book thinks it is making a feminist point of some kind.  This maybe true if it was written in 1800, but my today's standards this book is quite the contrary.  Simply saying your female lead is unlady like because she works a little is not even a little feminist.  Having her make her own decisions, not be defined by a man or need of a relationship, giving her meaningful friendships with courting aged men without romantic interest and best -real- friendships with other women would be a decent start.  This book fails to do anything of the sort.I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.