Didn't live up to the hype.
Like many others before me, I felt like this was marketed wrong. A Princess Bride retelling? Yeah, only the last 50 pages or so. The rest had a very loose PB structure. So that had me bummed from the beginning, but having previously enjoyed Sarah Henning's books, I stuck it out. And the ending made me glad I did. It gave me faith in this series, though this first installment left something to be desired.
👍 What I Liked 👍
The end: This is going to sound really backward, but I didn't like most of this book. The characters didn't wow me, the story didn't capture me and the world wasn't build well enough. But the ending really gave me high hopes for the next book in this series. And when I say ending, I actually mean the epilogue. It really set up the follow up in a masterful way that makes me impatient to read it (lucky me, I have an ARC!)
👎 What I Disliked 👎
Amarande: While none of the characters particularly appealed to me, Amarande was my least favourite. I didn't feel like she had any kind of personality that was her own. Instead, she was 100% her father. He was her personality. She didn't have one of her own, she was only her father's teachings. And that just annoyed me to no end. Yes, of course we're all a product of our parents and their teachings. But they aren't the entire sum of us. I wanted Amarande to be a character in her won right, to have a say of her own. But I didn't feel like she did.
Repetition: There was an annoying repetition to this story, that came up time and time again. Amarande has a habit of replaying her father's words and teachings in her mind, and she does this every time she needs to make a decision. The first couple of times it was cute. But it didn't last very long. Around the fifth time I was over it and the 30th time I was hating it.
World building: Aside from the fact that there are multiple kingdoms in this world, one of which is practically lawless, and that these kingdoms somehow owe something to Amarande's father, not a lot else is known about this world. It bothered me, because there were certainly tensions between the representatives of these kingdoms, but they felt hollow to me because I didn't have the context or the backstory for the tensions. So I didn't feel like I saw the full picture...
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