Review: Unexpectedly Great!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 9, 2013
To be perfectly honest, I was looking for something fun and relatively mindless to while away a day or two, and this was a suggested option for me. I hadn't read the description and simply dove in, determined to get lost in something mildly entertaining, but nothing that would wrap me up as completely as this book instantly did. First of all, it is one of the most unpredictable books that I've read in a long time, simply in the sense that there weren't any of the tell-tale plot twists or hackneyed story lines, even in a genre like fantasy/sci-fi that does tend to use similar conventions. From start to finish, the book kept me guessing, and a book that can continue to surprise is always one worth paying attention to. I particularly like how Furse didn't immediately pose Nell as anything but what she was, a normal, scared teenager facing the challenges of growing up. Normality is key to the believability of a story, particularly when there is so much else about the story that is unbelievable and "out there" so to speak. Grounding the narrative in a really compelling, strong young woman, and complicating it with a very odd father figure was a very real and human element of the story that drove it forward, even as it became clear that Nell was anything but. Readers need those points of relativity to make a story connect with them on a normal level, since it can be difficult for some people to fully immerse themselves into a fantasy world without some sort of lifeline to the real world. Furse provides those human moments in spades, and for that, I will certainly be reading the rest of the Wexkia trilogy. This was quite a fortuitous find!