Review: Great Read.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 28, 2013
I enjoyed this book. It was a good value - $3.99 for many pages of entertaining reading.The worldbuilding was great I really have nothing bad to say about it. I got attached to the characters and there was definite tension throughout the book that kept me reading until the end. I felt like the main characters were pretty toast if things went wrong for them throughout the book. The love subplots were a little slow moving, but that's OK to me.One criticism that I have of the book would be that I do feel like the main bad guys were mostly characterized by violence in general and therefore seemed somewhat wooden."Who are you?""A VILLAIN!""? Why are you a Villain?""Because I LIKE TO HURT PEOPLE""-_-"Same goes with the main bad guy. Why is he a jerk? Just is.Another criticism that I have of this book is that it uses sexual violence against women as a characterization device. Both in order to define characters as villains and to provide a transition for a character between dirty and accepted. This crutch is common in fantasy literature but I still don't like it. There's a character in the book that has been repeatedly subjected to sexual violence consistently for a long period of time. The character bounces back and moves on unrealistically fast. Sexual violence is a serious thing, and not to be used as part of a redemption story arc. Honestly, if you're going to write about this subject matter.. You'd better be a really good writer and willing to make the characters go through multiple scenes of dialog and emotions. There are other problematic things about his use of this device, but they'd involve talking about specific points in the plot. Bottom line, I don't feel that it was necessary.Again, this book was interesting to me and I liked it - despite my rather voluminous explanation of the parts that I did not like.