Perhaps the founding document of modern romantasy and certainly most of the features that we expect from the genre are already present. There’s no real raunchiness yet (our heroine is but still a teenager after all) but perhaps the weakest aspect is the pacing. Following the set up and journey to Rifthold things slow down a lot as we crawl our way through the early rounds, only for things to get really interesting once the ghost of Queen Elena turns up. But then we are back to the grind and events drag for both the characters and the reader. We’ve just had the yuletide ball, heavily trailed as being of great significance but nothing actually happened. More action please!
I’ve never finished the book, and although I can certainly see the attraction of the story this is not the fully formed peak of romantasy that Sarah produced later on. The story is a bit flabby, the characters are a bit wooden, with unclear motivations (perhaps deliberately for example in the case of the king, but it still doesn’t make for easy or compelling reading) The fantasy elements are fairly pedestrian, there’s no new ground being broken here, nd the actual “romance” is both caste and quite low-key.
The story doesn’t really stand on its own at all and perhaps I am doing an injustice by reviewing it before reading at least some more of the series but that’s the way I chosen to do things! I will read on – I have a lovely matching set of all eight volumes, and you know how much I love matching sets… Let’s see how it progresses from here.