Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this book because of how much I enjoyed Blake's Anna Dressed in Blood and Girl of Nightmares. I was curious what sort of high fantasy story she might tell. I'm conflicted about writing this review because on the one hand I did not like this book. But on the other hand, I think there are a lot of people who will love it. So maybe my opinion on this one doesn't really matter. The book is the story of 3 sisters, triplets who were separated as children and raised by different magical/political factions. Eventually the sisters will continue the land's mythic tradition of attempting to kill each other using their mystic powers (one can resist poison, one can control the elements, and one can bond with and control animals) and the survivor will be crowned queen. The story moves from sister to sister with each chapter, describing the months leading up to the ceremony which marks the beginning of open war between them. I think the world Blake is striving to create is a dark fairy tale place, a world with strange rules aren't rational but are consistent within the confines of the story. I think many readers will enjoy that element, swept up in the wild fantasy of it, but I was bothered by the fact that her world seems poorly thought out. Though it gives the impression of a fairy tale place, it lacks the clarity and simplicity of fairy tales. Blake tries to create a more complex and nuanced world, but she never steps back to give the reader a clear view of it, so we're left with something that feels cluttered and poorly thought out. Concepts and rules pop up randomly when Blake needs a new plot device to knock the characters around with. Choosing to follow all three sisters is ambitious, but it gets confusing as each sister is surrounded by her own cast of supporting characters, most of whom remain flat and indistinct. About a third of the way through the book I stopped trying to remember who the supporting characters were because other than a few of them (Jules, Joseph, Billy, and Pietyr), they didn't seem to matter. They were just props to torment, comfort, or provide counsel to the sisters. It seems like there's a disconnect between Blake's ambitions for the story and the format she chose to write it in. She should have cut down the number of named and recurring characters significantly, or written a much longer and more detailed book. Lastly, this book is dark. That may seem obvious based on the premise, but there's more to it than that. There's a lot of violence and sacrifice and tragedy that seems to serve no real purpose except to put the characters through crap. The book describes the months leading up to the "action" and yet characters are disfigured, mutilated, and crippled well before there's any reason for the violence to have begun. Death and injury can be very powerful events in a story, but here it felt meaningless... and cheap. Like Blake was saying, "Hey, I've told you twenty times how nice this character is. Now I'm going to hack off her hand. But it's not going to be important or meaningful except that it'll make you feel lousy." Or maybe the real problem is that I'm just not quite the right audience for this book because I never quite fell into the world enough to be captivated by it.