Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have to agree with Helen Hancox below. And frankly, I wish there'd been more readers like her who'd spoken up, because I would have saved myself some cash. "I actually found it quite hard to get through this book as it felt very disjointed and the lack of flow and of coherent direction most of the time made it rather disappointing." -- Originally published for Curled Up With A Good Book © Helen Hancox 2008 If I had realized that when Reviewer: D. Merrimon Crawford mentioned "Told through Lizzie's eyes" meant told via 1st person as opposed to primarily focusing on Lizzie's point-of-view, that would have been my first clue that I would not enjoy this novel. There have been only a true select few authors (Kresley Cole and P.C. Cast among said few) who've been able to pull off the "first person narrative" and make it work for me, even forget that it *is* being told in the first person (which I usually find very distracting). I also made the mistake of assuming (I know, I know) that Pirate the dog would be more like a "familiar" than whatever his purpose is in the story (I still don't know... if it was to provide comic relief, I didn't feel it). But what I found to be most frustrating with this story, and what made it hard for me to get truly absorbed, was the fact that every single character outside of Lizzie and Pirate consistently acted as though Lizzie should know more, know better, be better, even though she had been raised with *no knowledge whatsoever* and *they all knew it*. It drove me crazy that Lizzie never really called them on that point to my satisfaction. I also thought there'd be more "shape-shifting" and magic revealed with Dimitri the Griffin... I think he was a griffin only twice in the story, and that was it. No depth to what could have been a truly interesting character, based on his griffin half and what griffins represent in mythology. No expansion. He was flat, and their relationship felt forced to me. Rushed. Actually, come to think of it, the entire story, all 292 pages of it, felt rushed. Perhaps it was the publisher, the editors who hacked and sliced at the depth of this story. Perhaps it never had it to begin with. All I know is that for me, multiple characters were tossed into the reader's direction with no rhyme or reason, little --if any-- development, and the story overall never got off the ground. It was all surface skimming throughout. A fact: I devour novels. A 292 pager normally reads for me in 5 hours or less. This one took me 3 days. Why? Because I was willing to put it down to do other things before picking it back up. When I finally finished it, instead of setting it down with my "keepers", I threw it across the room to land in my "library donation" pile.