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melerihaf 's review for:
The Girl of Fire and Thorns
by Rae Carson
There were many, many things I liked about this book. I liked that Elisa was not slender and beautiful and that she had an unhealthy relationship with food. I liked that Elisa and Alejandro had a political marriage. (Political marriages do not happen in YA fantasy. The royalty always falls in love with someone perfect and can always marry whoever they want with no regard to political questions, which is not particularly historically accurate.) I liked the evolution of Cosme. I found the idea of the Godstone creative and interesting. But for whatever reason, this book as a whole did not gel for me. It may have been the desert setting. I tend to compare all books with desert settings to The Blue Sword, which I know is not fair, but it's such a fantastic book and the setting is so vivid that I just can't help myself. It may have been the ending, which felt really rushed. When I had about 20 pages left, I thought that the book was going to end with a giant cliffhanger because there seemed to be too many problems to be satisfactorily got through in so few pages. It may have been the mysticism. Magic is fine with me, but for whatever reason, adding God in to the magic mix just didn't work. (There's only one person who has been able to do that to my satisfaction, and that's Jim Butcher in his Dresden Files series. And that only works because he doesn't explore it too deeply.) So overall, a likeable book with decent characters and intriguing differences from more typical YA fantasies that somehow missed the mark with me.