Arielle

I tried reading this before the HBO series came out, and found it a hard slog. It's incredibly slow to start, and there are so many different characters to keep track of it's hard to bond with any of them. Embarrassingly, I had to watch the series before I tried this one again, but it was much better once I had an idea what the hell was going on - and the rest of the books were so much better! Three stars for getting me into the series and for general competence.

Interesting from a scientific standpoint but with cardboard characters.

This was my favorite book in the series when I was younger, but not so much now. Yes, it is partly due to the controversial romance. But it's not exactly the age gap I object to—this is a fantasy novel, I don't expect our morals to map 100% onto the fictional world of Tortall—but how it's handled. Pierce makes a point of presenting the moral dilemma in Daine and Numair's relationship when Numair says the age gap, the power differential, and the fact that he's known her since she was 13(!) makes him uncomfortable....but instead of addressing that at all, the issue is waved away by Daine deciding that's she's totally mature enough for a relationship with her mentor, actually. Which honestly just makes her seem more childish! There also isn't a transition between Daine-the-kid and Daine-the-lover, either for the characters or in the narrative, so that whole storyline comes across as tone-deaf and inadvertently creepy. Just not great writing IMO.

These stories are gritty, shocking, and depressing, but hell, are they fantastic. Occasionally they get repetitive, since they're all centered around the same theme (growing up a poor, “white trash” lesbian in the American South), but you honestly don't realize that until after you're done with the book, because her writing is so alive.

I read this book primarily because it was the only one I had available while camping, and I once went hiking in the rain because it bored me so much. There were almost no redeeming characteristics about it; plot, characters, prose, al were uninteresting to me. It's the sort of book that winks at you a lot, taking pride in its own cleverness, except there is none. In short: I did not like this one bit.