I'm sorry to be really critical about any book because I can imagine how a book can be a labor of love for authors, but I have to say that I did not particularly like this. I didn't hate it, but the writing was poor and I found the characters and the story inconsistent. All of chapter 1 (granted it's only 4 pages) is used to describe Clio. I don't want to be told what a person is like, I want to learn through their actions. And then, frankly, Clio's actions throughout the book were contradictory to the long opening description. I was told she was independent and strong, and then later I kept thinking she needed to grow a backbone.
There were a number of passage that I felt hadn't been fully developed - or maybe the author was purposefully trying to be vague (although I can't imagine why) - and I couldn't understand what was happening exactly. For example, when Merrick uses the tunnel to recapture the castle and rescue Clio. There is no mention of a battle and whether or not it was successful. One minute they are escaping through the tunnel and then a few pages later I realized that they were living in the castle again. I had to back track (on this and a number of other occasions) to figure out what I had somehow just missed.
And then some of the writing, I was just like ??? For example:
"Like a field of golden buttercups that hides a prickly hedgehog, Lady Clio's hair hid her true nature." Just, wow.
And unfortunately this line was in the first chapter. I think some of the problems I had with this first chapter really colored the way I saw the rest of the book.
