When I requested this, I knew this was going to be tricky: a retelling of Dickens?
I would either love or hate it... as what tends to happen with all Dickens things (although I do tend to like the BBC adaptations)
So yes, I admit it, the only reason why I requested this was because of the author. I loved her first Lynburn book, and even though I wasn't a fan of the conclusion of the series (don't even get me started on Rusty and special snowflake Jared!), I knew what the author was able to pull through.
This one?
Unfortunately for most of seventy percent of it, the book is dull and boring as hell.
In the beginning, there's constant repetitions of dark this, bright that... blah, blah, that by the ten percent mark I was ready to DNF this.
The setting: a dystopian world divided between Light and Dark magic practitioners doesn't make any sense at all: there's this part in which Light practitioners have to be drained by Dark ones when they reach high levels of bright magic in the blood... however this only happens when they use their magic way too much, and therefore became drained of bright magic... and this is when they have to be drained? Haven't you read any sparkling vampire books? -_-
That makes even less sense!!
Dark magic and what creates doppelgängers is so poorly developed, that a doppelgänger himself even says that not even he knows what it means to be one of them.
WTH? -_-
The romance between Lucy and Ethan that ends up being main subject in the book (portrayed amongst a vague French Revolution setting) is so DULL and CHEESY.
Oh my God, the two of them were boring as hell: they're both special snowflake characters, so uninteresting that they are prone to put us to sleep.
This was the first time that I was actually cheering for the love triangle plot to actually come to live: Carwyn was the only one who actually had a spark of life to him, so of course I wanted him to have more presence in the book....
Hey, now that I think about it, Carwyn is this book's Rusty!
(show spoiler)The worst thing, is that the author really knows how to write ( were not for that, I wouldn't have been able to finish this), and the last thirty percent of the story, is actually good: Lucy comes out less as a puppet and more as someone who knows that she has to be manipulative to get what she wants.
Unfortunately that wasn't enough to save this story.
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