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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
Yawn!
To truly enjoy The Girl of Fire and Thorns you really need to leave your thinking cap at home. This series is V highly rated (esp. the sequels), but there was just not one thing about it that I actually found clever or intriguing.
To sum up:
This non-high-fantasy novel is over 400 pages, contains neither substantive lore/magic nor romantic tension, and dwells almost exclusively in a pseudo-Christian religion and war/military strategy. Do you love Jesus? Do you love war? Do you want to read long descriptions of food and tedious details about traveling from point A to point B? This might be the book for you.
To truly enjoy The Girl of Fire and Thorns you really need to leave your thinking cap at home. This series is V highly rated (esp. the sequels), but there was just not one thing about it that I actually found clever or intriguing.
To sum up:
This non-high-fantasy novel is over 400 pages, contains neither substantive lore/magic nor romantic tension, and dwells almost exclusively in a pseudo-Christian religion and war/military strategy. Do you love Jesus? Do you love war? Do you want to read long descriptions of food and tedious details about traveling from point A to point B? This might be the book for you.
How you feel about this book relies heavily on how you feel about its main character. Which is neither a good thing nor a bad one, but I guess I was one of the few people who felt solidly neutral toward Elisa during the entire thing. She was shy and sheltered in the beginning, and then by the end her best trait is that she is loyal and incredibly empathetic - which is wonderful, to be sure, but for whatever reason, that was not enough to get me to really connect with her. There was nothing that really stood out about her, nothing that made me sit up and take notice. Amost every heroine in every book ever is loyal and empathetic. So this book became one of those books where you feel like you're watching everything happen from far, far away and you think, oh, that's interesting, I wonder what'll happen? But there is no burning desire to crawl closer to the scene and know.
I did appreciate, at points, the gravity and seriousness that the author sets up the world and its problems. The problems, and the way they affect the characters, are incredibly realistic. I'm not sure if we really needed to see QUITE that much roaming around in the desert, but overall the writing style kept things moving. I alway love engaging takes on religion, so that caught and really is the reason my attention held for most of the book. I just wish it wasn't always SO serious. I would have really enjoyed a lot more humor and wit between the characters to help pass some of that time in the desert. But then...Elsa is just not a witty character.
So, if you're looking for something somewhat engaging and serious, this is a great book! If you want a little more...balance in terms of humor and tension, I'd look elsewhere.
I did appreciate, at points, the gravity and seriousness that the author sets up the world and its problems. The problems, and the way they affect the characters, are incredibly realistic. I'm not sure if we really needed to see QUITE that much roaming around in the desert, but overall the writing style kept things moving. I alway love engaging takes on religion, so that caught and really is the reason my attention held for most of the book. I just wish it wasn't always SO serious. I would have really enjoyed a lot more humor and wit between the characters to help pass some of that time in the desert. But then...Elsa is just not a witty character.
So, if you're looking for something somewhat engaging and serious, this is a great book! If you want a little more...balance in terms of humor and tension, I'd look elsewhere.
Quality fantasy, strong heroine, interesting take on religion. Princess Elisa is a bearer, chosen by God and implanted with a godstone which warns her of danger and warms to her prayers. But she's lived a very sheltered life until she's married at age 16 to the king of the neighboring kingdom. I was a bit thrown off by the use of Spanish--referred to in this book as the "lengua clasica"--without any real explanation. And though it wasn't your typical fat-girl-loses-weight-then-her-life-is-perfect plot, I kept expecting that every time they mentioned Elisa's weight loss, so that kind of interfered with my enjoyment of the book. But really, Elisa was a refreshing character in that she wasn't perfect, skinny and beautiful.
I liked it! It was fast-paced and engaging, although the whole Godstones in the belly button thing makes me think of Troll dolls the entire book and that was really distracting haha
Presently surprised and overall a fun book! :) It's her first novel and I'm hoping she writes more.
Finished this in about five hours, very much enjoyed it. Appreciated the different magic and certain characters. I found myself easily able to imagine myself in the world. Found the ending slightly lacking after the big build up but will probably be reading the sequels
This was alright. it was super obvious that this was the author's first book, so the writing itself, the pacing, and the character development were a bit choppy and odd.