Status Updates From Hartenbloed

After how much I enjoyed Wildwood Dancing, I did not expect to struggle so much with the prose in this one...

Marillier has several effects she wants at once—mystery, menace, tenderness, trauma, romantic tension—and the characters are being bent to produce whichever effect the scene currently requires.

The strangeness is being emphasized instead of allowed to become strange on its own. Marillier repeats that something is odd and then has character accept behavior that should logically provoke much more direct questioning. That creates an artificial kind of suspense: the mystery persists partly because nobody asks the obvious question.