Review: Painfully bad writing-- or a pastiche of bad writing, but I don't buy it
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 10, 2014
It's hard to know where to start...Vocabulary: the author misuses words, and not merely synonyms.  There is a difference between correspondence, which is written, and correspondents, who write it. Passing correspondents to the enemy gets them shot. There is a difference between a librarian, who works in a library, and a bookkeeper, who works in accounting.  And this is important: there is also a difference between a prologue, which becomes before a book, and an epilogue, placed at the end.  There are multiple, multiple other errors like these.Grammar: the number of grammatical mistakes is atrocious for Amazon-- this isn't even Smashwords-worthy.  Subject-verb agreement, correct use of pronouns... and when the author suddenly shifts everything from the past tense to the present and back without reason, it moves from annoying to confusing.  I suspect the only editing done was when the author pushed 'spell check'.And most important, even for those who consider the things like grammar and usage inconsequential: the story itself makes no sense.  We have a 17 year old high school girl who discovers that the reason she doesn't fit in is that she's, not weird, but special-- she's really an elf, and not just an elf, but the Queen of Elfland, and now must go save her people. Okay, that's a well-worn storyline, but still usable-- by someone other than Camilla Beavers. The high school girl's only talent is that she can see emotions as colors, and on arriving in Elfland can (without training or even being told it's possible) strip other people of their emotions. Within 24 hours she's crowned, and being chased by an assassin-- one who also attacked her back on earth, although there's no way mentioned for him to have discovered her there. [Elfland, incidentally, is a land where everyone speaks not merely idiomatic English, but idiomatic English as spoken by teenagers, not matter the character's age or role. The only thing the protagonist had to learn was to read the script of emotions used in older books-- in every other way, it was high school English with a few "milady"s thrown in.]There's also a boy, of course-- he tells her early-on, back at her earthly high school, that he's her bodyguard.  He started stalking her in high school, then rescued her from, well, something that occurred at a traveling carnival (drugs? assassination? magic? --as written, it's hard to tell), and took her off to Elfland in a rush because they were being chased by an assassin. Actually, just most of the way-- they had to walk through dark forest for a day and sleep in the woods, as for no comprehensible reason his magic just brought him to 30 miles or so away from Elfland. As a promise of things to come, they walk into the capital, apparently a walled medieval village with a castle (clichés do abound), where he proceeds to abandon her in the middle of the marketplace so he can attend to some personal business, asking "You'll be okay on your own?".  The assassin is apparently now forgotten, so she goes and gets something from one of the shops. Huh?  This is the body guard of a queen threatened by an assassin?This sets a pattern.  She's the newly-crowned queen, complete with evil, power-hungry uncle (who appears in the beginning, is quickly cowed, and is never heard from again), an assassin hunting her, and she's only assigned a single guard who is supposed to do 24/7 duty.  Except he doesn't-- the guard, whether the love-interest his replacement (when the love-interest recuses himself for half the book) just wanders off when the mood takes him; indeed, the second guard accepts her promise not to put her life at risk and goes to flirt with the chambermaid.  Did the assassin also promise to not risk her life?  And oh, yes-- no one mentioned it, but there's a war always about to start (or maybe it's started, but we aren't told), and the 17 year old keeps getting called to the war room to make strategic decisions, based I suppose on her time in high school.  Given the quality of the palace guards (and the one military unit mentioned, too dumb to follow simple orders, and whose leadership apparently can't be replaced), it may well be that the war is already lost anyway.It goes on this way.  The enemy is seen attacking from the east, although no one thinks it appropriate to tell her or her guard.  In the confusion, the assassin comes into her bedroom (everyone comes into her bedroom, which is neither locked nor guarded, and no one knocks), gives a long soliloquy on how her family wronged his, and then injects her with a deadly poison. Which isn't. Which is good, because although she has these magic powers that can stop someone's rage and hate, she apparently either loses them or forgets about them whenever she's attacked throughout the book.  [Towards the end of the book, she can also walk invisibly-- but that may not have been what the author meant to say.  It is hard to tell.]We also are expected to believe that, after living in the castle for some weeks, she still only knew two rooms (her bedroom, bathroom, throne room, and office apparently add up to two) and later, after months in the castle, she is surprised to look out the window of her bedroom and discover she's on the ground floor.  She isn't particularly observant.There is much more to-do as she and her love interest flirt, there's a bit of a second love interest (about whom she gets "tingly feelings" that are ascribed to mere friendship), she discovers that the evil assassin merely misunderstood what happened to his family, she comes up, against all military advice, with a battle strategy which apparently wins the war (in reality, a really bad battle strategy, but given that the enemy earlier seen attacking from the east apparently just changed its mind, who cares?), and there's a marvelously bizarre  and operatic scene in which a bad guy, pierced with a sword through the back and out the chest, manages to have a relatively lengthy and calm, albeit flaky, conversation before finally dying... and then (surprise!), she and her centuries-older, almost as immature, boyfriend are finally together.Followed by a brief epilogue, which is referred to as the prologue.If  I were a high school teacher and a student wrote this, she would get an easy B, after getting lots of help with her vocabulary, grammar, logic and plotting.  However, this is not a high school paper-- it's an independently published novel on Amazon.  Something this derivative and poorly plotted should be on a amateur site, at best... after being edited for grammar and usage.