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kareila_booksI was drawn in by the jacket's comparison to Seraphina and Graceling, but this story fell far short of those. It had a lot of good ingredients that didn't quite combine in a believable way, and although it succeeded far enough to keep me from giving up partway through, I was ultimately disappointed.
There's the naive redheaded heroine who is kidnapped and sold into an underground kingdom. The inhabitants are known to her as trolls, but they are actually powerful humanoid beings from another realm, trapped in their kingdom by a witch's curse. A "prophecy" says that if the heroine is soul-bonded to their crown prince, the curse will be broken. But the curse isn't broken, at least not instantaneously, which kind of sucks for everyone, except for the part where the crown prince doesn't actually want the curse to be broken because his father the king is a horrible evil overlord who would devastate the human world if freed. So the prince is actually a decent guy, and of course the heroine falls in love with him, and he wants to love her back but he's afraid to trust her with his plans of rebellion and pretends to be a jerk and blah blah blah. It's made to seem important that she has a beautiful singing voice but nothing seems to come of it except that her singing is the only thing that "soothes" her prince. Did I mention that trolls can't lie? Did I mention that the heroine doesn't know that she's also a witch? Did I mention that the "prophecy" was spoken by the troll queen's creepy conjoined twin? I think ultimately this book suffers from having too many tropes.
There's the naive redheaded heroine who is kidnapped and sold into an underground kingdom. The inhabitants are known to her as trolls, but they are actually powerful humanoid beings from another realm, trapped in their kingdom by a witch's curse. A "prophecy" says that if the heroine is soul-bonded to their crown prince, the curse will be broken. But the curse isn't broken, at least not instantaneously, which kind of sucks for everyone, except for the part where the crown prince doesn't actually want the curse to be broken because his father the king is a horrible evil overlord who would devastate the human world if freed. So the prince is actually a decent guy, and of course the heroine falls in love with him, and he wants to love her back but he's afraid to trust her with his plans of rebellion and pretends to be a jerk and blah blah blah. It's made to seem important that she has a beautiful singing voice but nothing seems to come of it except that her singing is the only thing that "soothes" her prince. Did I mention that trolls can't lie? Did I mention that the heroine doesn't know that she's also a witch? Did I mention that the "prophecy" was spoken by the troll queen's creepy conjoined twin? I think ultimately this book suffers from having too many tropes.
