Hmm. And hmm again.

The final instalment of the much-hyped Bitterbynde trilogy left me a bit disappointed, shall we say. Book 1 was alright – very wordy, too many descriptions, flowery language, and hefty lists bunged in to show CD-T had found a book on medieval cooking and by god she was going to tell us she knew the names of six dozen obscure implements! (oddly, the only time I liked such a list is when she went for plants – probably slightly exotic ones to an Antipodean, but they all grow in my garden and I could feel smug knowing how to pronounce cotoneaster properly!).

Where was I? Oh yes. Book one turned into a standard quest-journey tale; book 2 revealed much of the back story, and thus caught my interest hugely more – it also calmed down a bit on the florid language. Sadly, book 3 didn’t continue the upwards trend, but instead seemed to meander through several almost pointless diversions as our main character went on yet more cross-country trips. Sigh. By this point, I was after a tense conclusion, not more pages of journeying, loooong descriptions, and quite frankly sickly lovey-dovey-ness. Yes, I know girls read fantasy too, but that doesn’t mean we need the Mills’n’Boon version!

Frankly, the book was so slow-paced, it took me a fortnight to read – including three days for the last 50 pages, which would usually be swallowed up in a oner.

The final denouement did have more of a twist than I was expecting, but overall I just wasn’t as impressed as I think I could be. Worse, the list of acknowledgements at the end lead me to believe that most of the background, at least, was completely unoriginal, and if I just knew more of my own historical myths I would have been irked by more than the few obvious rip-offs I spotted.

Diverting enough, and with some decent ideas in there, but not exactly original, badly paced, and girlier than a princess-y slumber party with a cuddly pink fluffiness theme.

(although yes, it is still worth consuming – I wanted the ending. And it was still half-decent story telling somewhere in there. Bah)