Sci-Fi & Fantasy Girlz discussion

Don't forget the spoilers tags!

I finally finished this one up today. Overall, I have to say I didn't much care for it.

I'm going to start this off with a little YMMV note. My experience of this one wasn't great, but I can see how other folks might have been more drawn in than I was.

I found her use of third person omniscient voice a little off-putting given the number of characters and the way the narrative jumps back and forth between them. It made the action somewhat hard to follow for what I went into thinking was going to be a light, unchallenging text. We go from one character's POV/thoughts to another very quickly in this book, giving the reader little time to absorb either. In combination with things like name changes, relatively similar names of some characters, and time jumps, I found the story itself lost in the shuffle.

The magic system of her world also struck me as odd. It's just hard for me to take invisible (to most people) little fairies and creatures seriously in a story that's meant to be in many ways a gritty fantasy. On occasion they were clearly meant to be comic relief, and that's all well and good for most folks, but it's the kind of element that makes me grit my teeth in that it seems like a Disney-esque treatment of what is already a dicey proposition.

There are a few details/plot points that I also struggled with. The existence of an (view spoiler)[incestuous (hide spoiler)] relationship, for instance, isn't in and of itself a deal breaker. (I, personally, have few "triggers" but again with the YMMV note.) However, the simple inclusion of that kind of thing without drawing any particular conclusion from it on a moral ground strikes me as a waste of opportunity and theme. There were a few of these sequences. Jill's father, Cullyn, very quickly coming to grips with the idea of his daughter (view spoiler)[becoming his lord's mistress (hide spoiler)] didn't ring true to me either. We've just gone through hundreds of pages of him being overly protective (arguably) and very particular when it comes to the decorum of his own status, her status and worried about her future, but he got open-minded real fast when that seemed to fit into the plot. (And the story needed to get wrapped up.) That read as a little heavy handed writing to me.

This is the first of a series, and thus there's an argument to be made that the author is warming up her pen. Having not read any of her other works, I'd be curious what other folks think about that possibility.