Review: An Epic High Fantasy  **3.5 STARS**
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 27, 2014
NIHAL OF THE LAND OF THE WIND reminds me of other classic girl-in-a-man's-world stories.  Her character starts out young and enthusiastic about becoming a warrior, but over time she is beset by challenges. She overcomes these hurdles one after another, but not without learning lessons that harden her.The style of presentation is the most difficult part of this book to accept. Some of the dialog is awkward, and the writing is frequently stilted and flat.  And worse, sometimes I couldn't tell what was happening. I'd go back and read and re-read a section with action and there was no clear presentation of the action. (Possibly to avoid describing violent deeds. Possibly because the publisher demanded a shorter book.)Despite this I really enjoyed NIHAL OF THE LAND OF THE WIND.  And remembering that this was a translation from the Italian, as well as the fact that this series was intended for Tween and Middle-graders helped me to glide over the problem areas.The story in general reminded me of Tamora Pierce's ALANNA series, except that Troisi's plot is darker and Nihal is flawed, where Alanna measures up close to an ideal standard for human behavior.  Both girls want more than anything to be a knight. And both girls meet one obstacle after another.  But where Alanna's focus is on serving good, at this point in the story arc Nihal is confused, and she is more interested in seeing enemy dead mound up beneath her feet, than developing her own standards of behavior.~If you are a Type-A reader where everything must be perfect, then you should probably avoid this series. The 'flat' story telling --like you find in children's fairytales-- and the sometimes awkward rendering of things into English is likely to drive you crazy.However, if you want a different sort of grand epic tale with magic, dragons, knights, and human drama, you might very well want to pick up a copy.  I ended up liking this story more than I expected.  There's a good story here.--review copy