Review: Definitely not trite.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 27, 2012
This is the first work by this author that I have read, and I was impressed.  There is an understated feel to the first person narration that I like.  It adds to the impression that the protagonist could actually have experienced the events.  I was also grateful for the first person point of view because there were a couple of places I used it to reassure myself that Elzibeth survived an encounter.I like this kind of fantasy where the characters feel like real people and each page produces action, situations, and descriptions that *almost* fit what we understand from our world.  There are big things that we don't see around us every day, like dragons and knights in armor, but there are little ones that sneak up on us as we're reading that underline the fact that we're in another world: kids are present in taverns because it's the place people congregate, people have to wait a whole year for manufactured goods because the peddlers were snowed out.  You get the picture.  And that's one of the nicest surprises I found in this book.  The pictures in my head seemed to put themselves together as the story flowed, much like they were helped along by the magic of the flute.The new edition has very few typos.