This story line is excellent. It’s unique, it’s interesting, and it’s relatively unpredictable. This could be a five star book. But the author has clearly aimed his book at what he thinks 15 year old girls and boys want in a fantasy series. So – along with the fighting, daring escapes and palace intrigue, there is way too much veering off into descriptions of lush bodies and sculpted chests and unquenched desire. It breaks the story line and interrupts the mood. And the characters are one-dimensional. The best fantasies give the characters a quest or a clear goal or a gradual revealing of who they really are inside. But everyone in this trilogy has the emotional level and odd modern language of the average American mid-teen. (So, for example in a Medieval setting, a thief says, “That’s not happening!”) It breaks the flow. The narrator is not great, either. He’s not bad, really, but he can’t seem to inject a sense of atmosphere. The best readers of fantasy can make the listener hear the sneer in a voice, the quick breath of fear, the sly anticipation of the last sentence in a chapter. There is none of that here. The rushed pace, the expression, the volume never changes. And forgive me, but all the young women sound more like drag queens than girls. The book reads a bit like Piers Anthony’s earlier works, but without the humor and puns. It’s a shame.
