Review: Does not live up to its potential
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 2, 2011
This was one of those very sad books where the premise is quite good, but the end result doesn't live up to its promise. The bones of the story were interesting, but there wasn't enough flesh on them to make a good tale.  Many things in the history of the Underworld were alluded to, but never explained or clarified (or even mentioned again) although the implictation was that they did have relevance to the action.  There were also things that occurred which seemed to just be left dangling - they served no concrete purpose in advancing the story.  An example here would be the attack on Meredith, Him, and Sir Gwydion before the bridge - it's only purpose was to remove Sir Gwydion from the rest of the story (while leaving his fate undetermined).The book could have used an editor to tighten things up somewhat or to expand on some of the allusions (with the understanding that if there's a sequel - which the title implies - more will be explained then), but even more so, it needed a proofreader, plain & simple! Editing was BAD.  VERY bad! Homophones, missing words, even one or two instances where it looked like the author had changed the phrasing of her sentence as she was writing, and didn't strike out or remove the rejected material! I learned a new homophone here - 'shoe' for 'shoo' (and in the next paragraph, it was correctly spelled as 'shooed')!  Based on the poor quality of writing shown here, I'd be very hesitant to read a sequel even though the story itself was interesting enough.Note on Kindle formatting:  About average.  Paragraphs were not consistent, which was most noticeable during conversations when the 2nd line of a brief paragraph was indented just like the first line.  Other than that, the actual Kindle formatting wasn't bad - I'm making a distinction between the 'literary' aspect of it, mentioned above in regards to editing & proofing, and the purely technical aspect of preparing the work for use on the Kindle.  The first was very poor; the 2nd about average.  Readabilty was more affected by the poor editing and proofing than by the technical issues of Kindle formatting.