TBR Challenge - Book #1 Done!

[niko]

Book #1:  The Broken Crown by Michelle West

Phew.  Cutting it pretty close, but I finished up my first month's TBR Challenge book.  This was quite a difficult read for me.  I can't say I didn't enjoy it at all, but I'm also not jumping up and down in anticipation of the next book in the series.

The primary plot of the book is the story of a young woman, Diora di'Marano, living in a kingdom called the Dominion where rigid social structures and uber-patriarchy are the defining elements.  Women are technically nothing more than property, living in harems and wielding only what power they can achieve through their husbands, but Diora has several thing working to her advantage - exquisite beauty and grace, a reputation as "The Flower of the Dominion", and a secret, taboo magic that only she and her aunt are aware of.  She is married into the Dominion's ruling family only to have that family destroyed by an ambitious general in alliance with evil forces, and Diora sets out to gain revenge using what tools are available to her as a woman in a male-dominated society.

Much of this book was a reeeeeeally slow for me.  A bit too much fantasy jargon for its own sake and too much over-reminding the reader about every little detail of the world-building was compounded by an extremely formal narrative style that was just really unwieldy for me as a reader.  I suppose it fit the world that she had created, so I can't fault her for it particularly, but it was really hard to immerse myself in the world when I kept stumbling over sentence structure.

My favorite part of the book was actually a comparitively short interlude (a quarter of the book, at most) that focused on activity going on in a neighboring kingdom as the rulers there find themselves having the only rightful ruler of the Dominion in their custody and having to choose whether to go to war as his ally or sit back and let their enemies duke it out.  The characters in this portion were much more engaging, and I presume that they get more to do in the next books, so I'll probably pick up the second book in the series at *some* point, but this won't be springing to mind as a must-read series any time soon.