Book it Chewie

It's unfortunate that I only managed to get through around half of this book, though I would've enjoyed finishing it, and will probably do so at some point in the future. As it is, this'll be short and sweet.

Negatives - There's way, WAY too much exposition. I felt flooded with details sometimes, having to go backwards constantly just to pick out the important information before I could continue reading. I don't need to be told, in great detail, of every object sitting in a room. A quick, smooth mention of the general feel of a room is enough - a character walking into a room, glancing up at it for a moment, will not see everything, and will likely focus only on things that are immediately out of place.

I'm also not sure exactly how well the pace felt in general. So many of the details were not needed and snagged me that the story felt like it was progressing really slowly. I think though, that with a bit of smoothing out, the pacing would flow a lot more easily and fluidly.

For the plot - honestly, I'm not sure I could give a description of it if a random person came up to me and asked me to describe it. I felt like it was there, but I simply wasn't seeing it yet. If it's meant to be a slower-paced, character-driven, possibly low fantasy book, then this point is sort of irrelevant as I would happily accept this as a story designed for setting up the world and characters within.

Positives - The world felt interesting to me. It came across as a Standard High Fantasy sort of dealio, but that was okay with me as it also felt like it was comfortable there. The world itself felt natural to read, and I wanted to know more about it.

The characters! They were interesting, I especially loved reading Azure's PoV. I wanted to know more about her, and why she was born blue, but sadly I didn't find out anything about that.

The author has a very prominent style, and a knack for writing. The characters feel clever, the writing feels clever (once you mentally strip away the unneeded information), and there were a lot of moments where I smiled, laughed or was sincerely surprised. What I did manage to read, I really enjoyed.

However, even though I enjoyed this book, it needs some serious editing done. There is just far too much information being presented that we really don't need, and as much as I liked the characters, a little more fleshing out for them would've been great.