Sierra
I both love and hate this book. I really wanted to love it, as someone who loves horses and folklore, but unfortunately it was a bit disappointing. It rook me 3 weeks to get through the first 2/3 and then I finished the final 1/3 in a day. It began too slow for me, with too uncertain a setting in time and place and plot-driving character decisions mistifying me in annoyingways, before ramping up and enthralling me for the final 1/3, and finally ending much too quickly without satisfying me just as it had finally commanded my attention. For me, this book is a lot better in retrospect and as a subject of thought and fan art I think than the actual experience of reading most of it. Which eats at me, because this book could have been one of my favourites with a few tweaks. But it is what it is and so I'm left with this love-hate longing that is as poetic as this annoyingly bad-good book.
On a side note, if you're not from the UK, I would recommend reading with some form of UK accent; it improved the experience for me. The setting is very British Isles coded, from the geography, to the sheep, to the tea, and their seemingly Welsh or otherwise British Isles-inspired tradition that I won't spoil. I was a third into the book before I had enough data to deduce it is a fictional place located off the coast of a country in the real world, somewhere in the 20th century. I do wish the writer had made the setting more clear earlier on because I kept assuming it was a completely made-up world in an equivalent to the middle ages and this didn't allow me to settle into, and begin accepting, the world as quickly as I would have liked.
I both love and hate this book. I really wanted to love it, as someone who loves horses and folklore, but unfortunately it was a bit disappointing. It rook me 3 weeks to get through the first 2/3 and then I finished the final 1/3 in a day. It began too slow for me, with too uncertain a setting in time and place and plot-driving character decisions mistifying me in annoyingways, before ramping up and enthralling me for the final 1/3, and finally ending much too quickly without satisfying me just as it had finally commanded my attention. For me, this book is a lot better in retrospect and as a subject of thought and fan art I think than the actual experience of reading most of it. Which eats at me, because this book could have been one of my favourites with a few tweaks. But it is what it is and so I'm left with this love-hate longing that is as poetic as this annoyingly bad-good book.
On a side note, if you're not from the UK, I would recommend reading with some form of UK accent; it improved the experience for me. The setting is very British Isles coded, from the geography, to the sheep, to the tea, and their seemingly Welsh or otherwise British Isles-inspired tradition that I won't spoil. I was a third into the book before I had enough data to deduce it is a fictional place located off the coast of a country in the real world, somewhere in the 20th century. I do wish the writer had made the setting more clear earlier on because I kept assuming it was a completely made-up world in an equivalent to the middle ages and this didn't allow me to settle into, and begin accepting, the world as quickly as I would have liked.