I think my first thought is that this was a long book overall. I would actually give it a 3.5 rating but Julie Czerneda's writing was excellent as always and so I gave it the 4. The entire story takes place in about a weeks time frame so you can see it was possibly a bit drawn out. There are three characters whose perspective the story is told from. The story itself was good, just not great in my opinion. I ended up never fully understanding the "alternate" reality where dragons and magical characters live. While it was fantasy it still didn't completely make sense to me. The writing though was excellent overall with detailed, possibly a bit too much detail, backgrounds and complete details on so much of the background. With all the detail you might think the story would be difficult but the story itself was very straight forward if a bit convoluted. I would recommend the book but still have mixed feelings. I do plan on reading the sequel and have noted it is about 200 pages shorter which might make for a more fun read. Sometimes books too long become more of a chore than a pleasure. I wanted to like this book - the promise is interesting, the world and characters are good. Unfortunately, the awkward writing style made this extremely difficult to get into with any success, over-shadowing all the good in it. In this kind of epic story, you need to fall into the story, become engrossed and suspend belief, which can't happen when you keep getting stuck on weird phrasing and unclear writing. Despite this, it was an ok story, but I have no desire to read more of this series, or this author based on this particular sample.
Do You like book A Turn Of Light (2013)?
An excellent book! A great story, a great read, and a great deal of fun!
—Lori
