Review: A quest story
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 3, 2013
Where to begin... I am still not sure what the title has to do with anything. The writing is aimed at the older teen crowd but that is no excuse for poor editing,frequent tense changes(past to present, first person to third, etc)and juxtaposition of formal speech with phrases from current teen culture. There were some elements that seemed to move the story forward and develop the characters and then there were things thrown in the mix that had nothing to do with the story line and went nowhere. The book seemed to end before issues were resolved and left a lot hanging. Overall a strange read with some gratuitous sex and violence,but I think that the schizophrenic writing  style and spelling mistakes  (flea instead of flee for example) distracted me way too much and I could not get past them.In this story a group of young men set out to recover the young girls who were kidnapped from their village in the jungle two years ago. During this kidnapping raid, several older people,mostly men, were killed trying to save the girls from the shapeshifters who took the girls. It has taken two years for the teenage boys of the village to train with various types of weapons so that they can battle the beast-men who took the girls. Now they have eleven volunteers ready to go with slingshots, swords, bows, knives and axes. On the way deeper into the jungle to try to find the lair of the shapeshifters, they encounter various other beings such as fairies,ogres, dragons and carnivorous plants. Some of them are very friendly and helpful,some are not.In the village of the shapeshifters,there are good, kind men and there are those who view the kidnapped women as glorified slaves. The women can only have children if they love their mates,so the clan is in danger of becoming extinct unless the good, kind men win out.Spoiler alert:With the help of a sleeping potion and some helpful fairies,the young adventurers manage to get all the women out of the shapeshifters village,along with the nicest of the shapeshifters. And there the story ends.Unsatisfying. Heat factor mild, some gratuitous violence with sex .