Review: I like royal intrigue and mayhem as much as the next person, but...
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 25, 2013
...There is a point when it starts to just get ridiculous.To be fair, the point in this series should have been in the first book, when--honestly, without any provocation whatsoever--someone decided to start shooting at Chey. But I let that go, I wanted to see where the story ended up playing out, and I assumed that the royal insanity would be maybe a little more moderate. By this book though, I just had the feeling that she was throwing as much crap as she could against the wall to see how much crazy would stick. Don't get me wrong, I was not expecting The Other Boleyn Girl, but I also wasn't expecting a soap opera.It also didn't help that one of my all-time leading lady pet peeves lasted for over half of the book--the mysterious flu that seems to come and go from the time the 2nd book ended to over halfway through this one. If you want to throw it out there a time or two in separate parts of the story, fine, but PLEASE do not mention it every chapter, over and over, with the stupid clueless woman being like, "Oh, I don't understand! This flu is so annoying! Why don't I have a fever?" It's really, really annoying when you just keep bringing it up--without resolution--SO many times.Another pet peeve is the editing. When I got the first book for free in the Kindle store, I assumed that it was self-published, so the couple of typo/grammatical errors didn't bother me too much, but each book has consistently more mistakes, like in this one, when Chey exclaimed to herself, "How dare him" when she should have said "how dare he." And this came up two or three times in this book. Once might be a mistake, but two or three... any editor worth his salt should have caught that.Another problem: the journal entries! There is NO reason for the journal entries! They literally just reiterate what you just finished reading... I cannot understand why the author decided to put these in, or why they were left in... they're just pointless repetition.I've also concluded that I don't particularly like Chey. It's taken me until this book to come to this conclusion; in the first book, I actually did kind of like her, but by the time I made it through this one, I no longer liked her. I didn't even dislike her, I just didn't care about her at all. Especially when she was completely and totally reckless and could have easily gotten herself killed, and then she had the nerve to be furious at Sander for telling her she shouldn't have done it... I despise when female characters have to be headstrong to the point of being completely stupid/reckless and then act like that. Have an ounce or two of maturity; acknowledge that lying and putting yourself into situations that could get you killed instead of letting someone else handle it is a bad, stupid thing, and that you were WRONG. Don't act like a 5 year old.Also, I think someone else pointed this out, but it was a little annoying that--with her expectations of someday becoming queen of this country--she didn't put in any effort to learn about the country/customs/language. She knew words like 'thank you,' but with all the time she spent hiding out, you'd think she could get an English to whatever-language-they-speak-in-Latvala dictionary/book and pick up a little more. I also would have enjoyed knowing more about the culture of Latvala. I think the only thing I picked up in this book is that the people are superstitious.One more complaint is the annoying sentiment of "I would never want to hurt or reasonably punish the people who have spent 3 books trying to MURDER me!" At this point, I think we can all agree the king and queen are morally reprehensible people. There's nothing even remotely human about them... which... I would have also preferred if they would have been more dimensional. But they weren't, so at this point, purely out of self-preservation/self-defense, Chey shouldn't have been all, "Oh, I hope you would never stoop to their level!" Um, if people tried to kill me for 3 books, I'm pretty sure the only concern I would have for them would be that they get locked up somewhere and the key thrown away, but I surely wouldn't hold it against anyone if they got injured or killed while someone was trying to save my life.Anyway, I thought this was the last book in the series, but then I saw that there's a 4th book. I don't hate the series, so I'll read the next one, but I'm hoping that the next one isn't as absurd. I was hoping to see a little more of Sander being a leader and Chey having to adjust to that life, a little less constantly being on the run for their lives.