Disappointing; Practically Fanfiction
581525
I have loved every Phryne Fisher book I have read: except for this one. I feel like I paid to read a Sherlock/Phryne Fisher cross-over fan fic. It's not even subtle that the BBC modernized version of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are main characters in the story. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. It was a disappointing outing for Phryne.
2120708
I wanted to like this story, and I wanted to like the series, but I think the author should have focussed on one of the girls in this book and fleshed out the others in the additional stories that are surely planned for the series.

The book begins slowly, with pretty much an "info-dump" about how the girls were born and why they are are named after the Disney princesses. They are pretty much treated as if they are actually one "person" for the first half of the book. "The Princess Sisters do this," or "the Princess SIsters do that."  This leaves very little room for character development except at the superficial level (describing their personalities rather than showing their characters through action.)

Still, this kind of characterization leaves it open for any reader to pick one of the Princess Sisters and pretend to be her, so it's not a bad idea in writing for this age group.

My one last quibble is that, while the book is obviously written for pre-teens, at least two of the mothers have never married (and thus had children out of wedlock.)  In a book for more mature readers this might be okay, but in something aimed at pre-teens who have little relationship experience, this might be something some parents would not be okay with their child reading.
975111
This "book" only has value if, as a fan of the franchise, you just have to know what happens. Personally, as  long-time reader of the original series, I found this book to be rather disappointing. There is so much potential here, and the development just wasn't there. Obviously that is because it was written as a play and was not meant to be as comprehensive as the original books. Perhaps the play would be interesting to watch. However, as a book it feels rather contrived at times and largely missing the original magic of the series. The dialogue often felt, for lack of a better term, cheesy and the characters rather flat. It reads fast, due to a low word count, but frankly I wouldn't spend my money on it unless you feel compelled
1624343
I have to think of this as fan fiction (fan fiction approved by Rowling so now canonical).  Wish I 'd waited and checked it out of the library instead of buying it. Maybe it is good that there is no real forward motion with the characters. Still, I'd rather read the lost diaries of Hermione Granger. To be more specific means SPOILERS AHEAD:  in book 3, Rowling handles time travel beautifully; no alternate timelines. Everything happens as if Harry and Hermione already went back in time. Not so here. Cursed Child turns Rowling's world on its ear and spins. . And then there's the rumor not only that Voldemort had a child, but that time turners were involved. Come on, Harry would be the first to explain why Voldemort would never do this. Time travel or not, V did not have a kid even if people in this story say he did--someone's lying. Finally, now that you have fans and HP following, please Ms. Rowling,  write about a female main character.
4141950
Occasionally, I read a book and mistake it for a first novel. Then I discover that the writer has actually written quite a few books. That's what happened with "Palace of Mirrors," at times it was almost like reading fan fiction. My main issue was with the language - often the heroine and her friends sounded like they were on a sitcom or at least from modern times, with expressions like, "Totally," and "What part of it, don't you understand," as well as lots of sarcastic quips. It's possible to mix the two, but since the author also seemed to be attempting to create a more old-fashioned atmosphere, it didn't work for me.

The plot concerns Cecelia, a princess in hiding, who leads a simple life in a village, while Desmia, the decoy, is on the throne. When she confides her secret to her friend Harper, his response stuns her, and is responsible for them heading off to the palace. Unsurprisingly, their attempts to meet with Desmia and explain the situation do not go as planned.

The secondary characters are likeable, including the assorted "pretenders," to the throne, as well as Desmia and Ella (who's the heroine of another novel). I also liked the villains because it was a relief to meet characters who weren't good and sweet. However, I felt like the author didn't trust her readers enough - there was too much repetition. For example, virtually every time Cecelia looked at Desmia, she thought how sad it was that Desmia didn't have a good knight to protect her like the other young girls. We also re-learned every 20 pages or so that one of the characters had freckles.  More editing would have helped.
633435
*** Review copy provided by the author ***

THE SHORT:  Disappointing, and frankly, I only finished this novella in the hopes that the back end would be better.  This book had the unfortunate trifecta of superficial world-building, underdeveloped/inconsistent characterizations, and flat/loose writing and/or editing.

THE LONG: I was really looking forward to reading KISSED BY MOONLIGHT by NTM author, Erin Moore.  Unfortunately, the second paragraph was an early red flag because the male MC first wondered why he'd volunteered for his "assignment" and then two sentences later, stated why he'd volunteered.  And there were more than a few instances of this type of flip-flopping.

Setting KISSED BY MOONLIGHT in Budapest, Hungary held potential to incorporate some of the local folklore into the shifter storyline but this wasn't done.  There's ambiguity as to how many humans knew about the existence of shifters.  [hidden spoiler removed for Amazon]  But most importantly, there is no real explanation for the long-term separation of the Wolven and Lupen clans, only mention of a pledge that the Wolven were to keep to the countryside.  Consequently, the supposed threat of the Wolven's domination of the Lupen lacked substance and the conflict/tension just felt contrived.

The MCs could've been better developed but honestly, my biggest problem with this book was the writing, both the creative and technical aspects.  Aside from some rather generic dialogue (especially during the sex scenes which, to me, were comparable to category romances with somewhat frank language), the frequency of words misused and "editing" misses/errors prevented me from ever getting into the story.  For example, in one scene, Morgane is bound hand and foot yet walks downstairs on her own while in another scene, Aelric takes off her dress but then a few paragraphs later, he pushes her skirt up.  And in one instance, Morgane declares her love before sex and yet afterwards, states that she is *falling* in love.

Again, the potential seems to be there but realising it would require a wholesale re-write, as well as much stricter editing.
181653
SPOILERS

Upon reading "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," I can only assume that Jack Thorne lived under a rock until quite recently, and has never been exposed at all to the mythos of the Wizarding World beyond its Wikipedia page, and yet somehow, by some unknown magic of his own, he managed to con J. K. Rowling into singing off on a half-backed Potterverse rip-off of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Dopplegangland." That is the only way I can justify the grossly out-of-character depictions of no less than Ron, Voldemort, Snape, and Harry himself. No character and no event is sacred, and all are trod upon with equal abandon. A supremely disappointing addition to this series that I will just pretend does not exist altogether.
4166075
It was alright; plot was fun. Sport-centric books are few and far between. Let alone sport plots with LGBTQA+ characters. But what kept bothering me (or distracted me from truly diving into the plot and characters) was that the names are SO INSANELY SIMILAR to their original The 100 character names. Alexis? Wait, that's Lexa. Graham Griffin is Clarke Griffin. Anika and Rosita? Seriously? More like Anya and Raven. And Lady Raiders? Oh, you meant Grounders. Right, okay...

This doesn't feel like an original ebook; it feels just like it's written as: a fanfic. It doesn't even feel like the author tried very hard to distance her "original" characters from their The 100 counterparts. I wish the author had gotten more creative with the names and characterization rather than the very slight twist that was given. Maybe then I would have enjoyed it more rather than playing the game of: who was this character originally supposed to be? It was distracting and I couldn't finish this book.
2224815
In SHADOW TAG, Irene discovers that her husband Gil has been reading her diary, so she begins a new hidden diary and uses her original diary as a tool to manipulate him.  Having been the victim of privacy theft with regard to my diary/journal, the premise of the novel sounded promising, intriguing, and relatable.  However, I was disappointed that there were very few diary entries, as this was how I expected the story to unfold.  Furthermore, what few diary entries there were weren't written very believably; they were written more like a person telling a story, which isn't how a person actually writes entries in a diary.

In addition to the diaries, there's an underlying layer of existing marital discord.  Gil is abusive; Irene is a drunk.  Apparently, that makes them perfect for each other, because -- to borrow a line from&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Brokeback-Mountain/dp/B00005JOFQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Brokeback Mountain</a>&nbsp;-- they just can't quit each other.  Unfortunately, unlike Jack and Ennis, neither Gil nor Irene have any likeable traits, which meant that there wasn't a single likeable main character in the novel.  Gil is an artist; Irene is his muse and model.  Maybe it's the artist in them, but both Gil and Irene seemed overly dramatic and/or melodramatic in their dialogue and actions.

Finally, this novel is all about reflections and/or the ponderings of the characters; there are little scenes of actual moments of action where something occurs.  While it was a quick read, what could have been told in a short story, the author chose to drag out into a novel-length book.  The extraneous details didn't reveal much more and did little to move the story along, engross the reader, or let the reader learn more about the characters.

In short, you can tell that I was not crazy for this book.  Skip it and check out something great like&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Water-for-Elephants/dp/1565125606/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Water for Elephants</a>&nbsp;instead.

Note to author: I know you're a published, established author with a number of books published in the double digits, but I have a plea.  In a society where texting, Tweeting, and Facebook are the norm for young adults, don't make them feel that it's acceptable to never learn proper English grammar.  One of my biggest pet peeves in novels is the use of "creative license" grammar.  That is, authors write with total disregard of proper grammatical rules.  Case in point, not using quotation marks to frame words spoken by the characters.  This is extremely evident in SHADOW TAG when the author combines character's dialogue with the character's actions in a single paragraph.

Example:
Stoney painted a scene for a play, Gil.  That's a cool thing for a six-year-old to do.  Irene took some salad, and then said in a more ingratiating tone, Your souffle is amazing.  You're a great cook!

How it should read:
"Stoney painted a scene for a play, Gil.  That's a cool thing for a six-year-old to do."  Irene took some salad, and then said in a more ingratiating tone, "Your souffle is amazing.  You're a great cook!"

Seriously, authors: please use quotation marks.  Not using them just makes me, the reader, feel as though you put yourself above the rest of us and that makes me dislike you and any and all novels you write.
3349284
I was initially excited about this book because the premise sounds great, but I hated the terrible character development. The main character is a Mary Sue, in the first-time fanfiction writer awfulness of the sense. It starts to go downhill when she is invited to a double date "as friends" by a male lead because the guy wants to set his genius physicist cousin up with a blonde, tall "Jewish American Princess" (the book's exact words, not mine). Well, the blond girl turns out to be the bimbo who can't relate with the genius physicist, but surprise surprise, the main character Mary Sue is smart enough to follow their conversation and impresses him. At one point, they're talking about languages they speak and Mary Sue rattles off more than ten. She's also a great dancer and has a photographic memory. These character elements could have all worked out well, but not with the poor writing that introduces them. I don't recommend this book. It was very frustrating.
1416272
Very, very poorly written. How on earth did this get by editors? I would expect this of fan fiction, not official cannon for the new universe.
1868544
I love the Sagas of the Norse, so I was excited when I learned that Neil Gaiman was releasing a novel of them. I anticipated a retelling, with his particular flourishes, as well as more dramatic perspective, added points of view, expanded characterizations, etc.

Nope.

It's a retelling of the Sagas, and not even all of them; predominantly, the most "popular" tales. So, I'm eating it correlates themselves, less a star for (as far as I can tell) Mr. Chairman doing little more than putting his name on the cover.
1699689
I wish I would have read the other disappointed reviews before I spent money on this disappoinment. It reads like bad fan fiction. I'm honestly wondering what Goodkind was going through as he wrote this, because so much of the writing is repetitive,  shallow, and not nearly as suspensful or satisfying as everything else he's written in this series.
89055
I was very excited about this book -- a French novel translated to English!  The British may shun it!  Controversy!

Unfortunately, "Elegance" disappointed from the beginning.  The two point-of-view characters are self-absorbed snobs who consider themselves "outsiders" because they lack the money and power of "typical" snobs (which conveniently describes the people who surround them).  Renee, the more tolerable narrator, is a fifty-something concierge of an upscale apartment building.  The other is Paloma, a twelve year old who lives in the same building.  Paloma introduces herself to us by explaining her plan to commit suicide on her next birthday, unless something interesting enough to distract her from doing so comes along before then.  Prior to the suicide act she plans to burn down her family's apartment, for reasons she explains but don't actually make any sense.  Renee's best friend is Manuela, the housekeeper of a couple of the apartments in the building.  Renee and Manuela sip tea and discuss people one or two afternoons a week, and otherwise Renee keeps to herself, enjoying books, art, and Japanese movies when she has the opportunity, which is most of the time.

Paloma's interest in Japanese Manga is enough to inspire her to teach herself to read Japanese, but apparently not enough to keep her from killing herself.

At 103 pages in, the characters and their situations have not yet become compelling enough to me to want to finish reading.  There have been a (very) few lovely moments of observation by each character, but the language is coarse and awkward, almost mechanical -- probably a function of inadequate translation.  The disdain the point-of-view characters have for the people around them, the remove from which they insist on reporting about them, is tedious.  While it succeeds in communicating their own sense of alienation, it serves to alienate them from the reader as well.  The moments of intimate experience of deeply felt emotion -- something Renee obviously craves and simultaneously rejects in one of the most beautiful passages I've yet encountered:
  "The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup -- this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion: is this not something we all aspire to? And something that, in our Western civilization, we do not know how to attain?"

This theme of alienation, of rejecting one's own culture and milieu for a perceived or wished-for something better "out there somewhere" is one that tires me.  Maybe redemption lies later in the book, and these narrators will find a thread of sympathy for one another, but their distance from others, their eagerness to hide themselves from the world, and the sparse moments of lovely insight like the one quoted above are making this book a tedious read.
4221411
The quote on the cover reads, "One of the very best writers of fantasy around" - Steven Erikson.  A lot of people really love Erikson's writing and with intriguing cover art I thought I'd give it a try.  Unfortunately, Kearney's retelling and spin on a classic Greek tale failed to resonate with me.  This book would be better classified as military fiction than fantasy.  The Ten Thousand takes place in the world of Kuf, which is inhabited by two main groups of people.  These are the Macht (a mountain dwelling race of warriors unparalleled in battle) and the Kufr (a vast land empire comprised of conquered and more civilized peoples).  When Arkamenes, the younger brother of King Ashurnan (current ruler of the Kufr Empire) secretly recruits ten thousand Macht mercenaries and combines them with his own army, he attempts to march straight into the heart of the Empire and overthrow his brother.  As you can well imagine, King Ashurnan doesn't take kindly to this treachery and of course war ensues resulting in unpleasant consequences on both sides.

Note: I have not read Xenophon's "Anabasis" nor have I read Frank Miller's "300" so this review has no bias in those regards.  However, I can easily see how this story is an almost exact retelling of these tales.

Here are my thoughts on Paul Kearney's The Ten Thousand;

Pros

+ A glossary was included at the end of the book detailing gods, weapons and relevant cultural terminology.

+ Decent amount of combat and battles.

+ Had a world map.

Cons

- Majority of the characters are underdeveloped, faceless and ultimately forgettable.  While the characters of Rictus, Gasca and Jason could be considered the main characters of the story, there are other characters who receive about just as much attention as they do and are less important.

- Fantasy elements are virtually non-existent.  I can only recall two fantasy related references within the story.  <Spoiler> One, being the black Cursebearer armour the Macht elite wore and two, the Macht's encounter with the yeti-like Qaf creatures while passing through a mountainous area <Spoiler>.

- Some places mentioned at the beginning of the book are not detailed on the world map.

- Bland and predictable story.

- Clich ending.

Unfortunately, after about the first 100 pages I found the Ten Thousand becoming a struggle to read.  The story didn't captivate me and none of the characters drew me into the book.  Even the somewhat eccentric usurper brother Arkamenes didn't pique my interest.  In the end, I began to contemplate that perhaps non-fantastical military fantasy is just not something I enjoy.  By no means do I need every fantasy I read to be "high fantasy."  This book just seemed to fall short on every level.  Other reviewers appear to have really loved this book.  I started reading another book half way through this one, always a bad sign.  For me it was a real struggle to want to continue reading it and I ended up having to force myself to finish it.
2492340
I have read better work on www. Fanfiction.net.  This is a third grade story of an awkward smart kid that saves a bunch of beautiful strangers in space.  I was on 2 month field op when I came across this book that seemed like it had potential, because it did have a lot of that, but it really lets a reader down with its (very) one dimensional plot and characters.  Truly this is an awful telling of a story.
1712528
This book had all the makings of an excellent story about two brothers bonding through trials and adventure. It begins as such, establishing Garret and Seth as two very different characters that bounce off each other very well. Then we find Seth is adopted AND THE BOOK IS HARDLY EVEN OPEN. the worst bit is that he's okay with it. The primary reason to put this in a story is to create tension and mistrust between family members. This is barely mentioned for the rest of the book, almost rendering it a moot point. Things go further downhill as Sara shows up. It's cute that the boys save her from a bully and the life of a prostitute, but her character hardly evolves beyond moony-eyed stares at Seth and claiming she's not worthy of his affection. I will add that this relationship is my main problem with this book. It moves entirely too fast for it to be believable. In fact, if the romance had not been present in this book it probably would be a decent read. The mythos established has a lot of potential for excellent novels, but it is ruined by poor writing of the characters.

Also, there were a few spelling and grammatical errors, though they were not as detrimental to the book as Sara and Seth's relationship. "my love" this and "angel" that. Great romance, by fanfiction standards.

This is a nipick, but I'm pretty sure if a horse is pushed to gallop for the better part of a day with maybe one break for water and fodder is not going to be able to maintain that pace again for another two days without proper rest.
You tried man, but you failed. BADLY.