A number of my friends strongly … encouraged? (yeah, we’ll go with “encouraged”) me to read The Lord of Stariel when I asked which of the assorted book club books available this month I should read for purposes of Bingo. I might make some enemies by saying this, but I didn’t love this book. It wasn’t bad by any stretch, and I can understand why some people might love it, but I thought it was just ok.
Mostly my complaints come from the book being very, very predictable. Take the blurb:
Everyone knows who the magical estate will choose for its next ruler. Or do they? Will it be the lord’s eldest son, who he despised? His favourite nephew, with the strongest magical land-sense? His scandalous daughter, who ran away from home years ago to study illusion?
Hetta knows it won’t be her, and she’s glad of it. Returning home for her father’s funeral, all Hetta has to do is survive the family drama and avoid entanglements with irritatingly attractive local men until the Choosing. Then she can leave. But whoever Stariel chooses will have bigger problems than eccentric relatives to deal with.
That blurb left me with a pretty solid guess on who would inherit. Turns out I was correct, which, ok, fine, that’s cool. But it took half of the book before we got to that point. That’s just too long for an author to take to lead me exactly where I think I’m going to go. There were other examples of things I considered to be obvious, but that’s the most egregious.
I’ve got no problem with stories that are tropey or cliched. But there needs to be something else interesting, and there really wasn’t here. I certainly got more interested after that halfway point, but it never really hooked me. I can get why some would find Hetta to be a very compelling protagonist, but she never really hooked me either.
I don’t want to talk anyone out of this book. Enough people whose tastes I really respect love this book that I’m sure it’s just a matter of taste. But it’s not for me.
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