Monday, December 30, 2013

The Wishing Well

125. The Wishing Well, Holly Zitting

The Wishing Well (Paradan Tales, #1)I got this book free on my Kindle--and I struggled to get through parts of it. The basic story premise is interesting: a girl (Aurora) who's been bullied hides herself in an abandoned well to get away from her tormenters and finds herself in a high fantasy world, a kingdom ruled by a wicked king. Aurora's immediately taken to the castle and forced to serve with other enslaved creatures (fairies, trolls, etc.) But after making friends with the castle staff, she finds her new security threatened when the king decides to cement his power in the kingdom by taking a pretty young wife and getting an heir--and Aurora is his choice. Since Aurora has already fallen hard for the king's stable boy, this isn't a future she wants for herself. At the same time, her personal struggles are mirrored by a rebellion growing in the kingdom, led by her boyfriend, Cassius.

Some concerns I had: not all of the plot made sense to me. For instance, if King Tommit needs a wife to help win the support of the people, why would he choose someone who wasn't even from his kingdom--no matter how lovely she is? While the story pacing was good, the story could have benefited from tighter editing: there were a number of distracting errors in the kindle version, and the descriptions sometimes tended to rely on cliches. Additionally, there were odd shifts in POV--after the first forty or so pages from Aurora's first person point of view, it was a little jarring to abruptly go to a third person POV--especially since some of the third person stories were from minor characters that we didn't meet until well into the story.

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