a great read from a great author I could write a dissertation on what I did not like about this book, The author has no original thoughts, is redundantly repetitive Yes, I did that on purpose, uses "details" that have nothing to do with anything unless she thinks she is creating red herrings.
She is sloppy and contradicts herself and is unable to resolve situations, Her characters must find their way to The Pale and when they get there, they ask if they are in The Pale and decide that they are not.
What the heck But it turns out that they are indeed in The Pale, A dragon appears but he is a friendly dragon, Whew! He flies them to the mountain, The little girl who lost her memory gets it back but is then stabbed through the heart but then lives b/c "nothing evil can hurt her".
Please, make it stop. I must remember never to pick up one of her books again, The "Wizard's Daughter", although part of a series, which I didn't know, I read and it served well as a stand alone book.
I'm not quite sure how to feel about this one, I kept reading feverishly for a while and then would drop it down, utterly discouraged at the lack of progress by the characters and the plot and yet intrigued as to how it would end.
It took a while for me to finally just get on with it and get the book read, I'm glad I did finish it as the most interesting bits came at the end, although it was a romanctic fantasy with a lot of time/character displacement and illusion so I'm also somewhat flat about the end because it's a bit confusing.
So, I liked it, but I am not going to go out and find more of the author's books based on this read alone.
A friend recommends this author, I am surprised, it is not my kind of book at all, Too repetitive for me, but I could see where others would like this, Interesting at different points and a couple of times there was a profound comment, This book was really boring to me, The characters were interesting enough and even the plot held major potential, The problem was it seemed to take forever to get anywhere in the story,
The dialogue was really awkward and the jumping narratives a little confusing from time to time, I had high hopes for this book based on the back cover description, but I just could not get into it, it never delivered what it promised.
It took me forever to read and when it was done I was vastly relieved! I made it about halfway through this but finally it just got too silly for me.
The butler wears old clothes because he likes them shiny, and he can see his face in them Impossible, I don't care how old and shiny they are.
And to add to that I just wasn't interested in the whole magic element so there didn't seem to be any point in continuing to read.
Catherine Coulter is one of those authors that if I see her name on the cover or spine of a book, I'm buying the book.
However, I personally find this book disappointing, in comparison to her other works, and the plot itself convoluted, This one was just not up to scratch, The characters were shallow. She was very wishy washy on some of the details, The couples relationship was very rushed and there was hardly any wooing or bonding,
The audio book is read by Anne Flosnik, I didnt care for her narration of the story and I am unsure if it is because I dont care for the story or just her narration.
Her earlier books are not my favorite, Not THAT brilliant, but it gave me a few laughs,
The PALE was a bit vague and bordered on the unbelievable, but then again, . . the Pale was not meant to be understood by us mortals with limited perspectives, I truly enjoyed Wizard's Daughter and revisiting the Sherbrooke family, I felt Coulter created a wonderful story that pulls you into the world of two individuals, their destinies, and the mysterious, magical world of the pale.
Ofcourse, being a romance novel, there are those infamous "love" scenes however, they compose only a small part of the story, The story really focuses on Rosalind and Nicholas, and their quest to solve the mystery of Rosalind's past and the pale, I felt the characters and scenery were brought to life with many twists and turns throughout the story that kept the reader guessing and captivated.
Coulter has you rooting for Rosalind and Nicholas from their first meeting to the end, As many Catherine Coulter fans know, Wizard's Daughter is the next book in the Sherbrooke family saga that began with the Sherbrooke Bride.
As with all of Catherine Coulter's books, Wizard's Daughter can stand on it's own as a story, If you liked Wizard's Daughter, then I would encourage you to read the stories of the other members of the Sherbrooke family, I guarantee their antics will have you laughing and their stories will captivate you, I read this quickly. I enjoyed the characters, but they could have benefited from more development, The plot took quite a while to get to the point, If I had to read this over a long time period, I probably would have abandoned the book, The plot also needed some refining, The bit with the dream where Rosalind kills Nicholas seems like it was thrown in for no reason other than the author wanted his family around for conflict.
Also the matter of someone attempting to shoot Nicholas was never dealt with, The sex scene was standard, but mildly amusing, Rosalind's foster brother involvement in the plot should have either been increased, or lessened, He just kind of disappeared from the book, with no resolution for his rather boring romantic troubles, or his part in why/how the book made it's way to him.
I would have liked more about Rosalind's family, I feel like that was the most interesting part of the whole book, and it was glossed over,
But all in all, this book amused me, and entertained me while I read it, Not something I am ever going to reread, but not a total waste of time, Very choppily written, especially as it continues, Just a weird premise. I didn't like it. Got it as an audio book at the Salvation Army forcents, As a car companion it was fine, As a book I would have probably given up, Great descriptions but how in Victorian England would a titled gentry however roguish be allowed a ward to marry in less than a week and really not for good reasons.
I just knew we were meant to be together, really
Trying to tie up all the ends once they get to the pale just felt rushed and didn't really gel together as a fully formed story.
Looking at some of the reviews before doing mine, many agree with me, It's truly a fluff read, What really did me in was the whole exchange about that Rosiland couldn't pick her clothes but could decorate, and Nicholas' choosing her clothes had to be approved by Ryder as "test" of his worthiness as a husband!!!!!!! And because this entire store literally takes place over the course of less thanweeks she never decorates anything.
Just one example of random stuff that didn't make sense, I struggled with this one, The plot was a bit like that children's game where you pull the string and the arrow points to an animal that makes that sound.
That was what it was like trying to follow the plot, I actually skimmed through the end just so I could be done, My first Catherine Coulter book, . . I think I may have chosen poorly, Didn't finish Coulter is a prolific and hugely popular bestselling author, primarily of sensuous romances, which she produces in various genres, This one is a fantasy, set primarily in the England of, but partly in an invented fantasy world called the Pale, She wasn't really on my radar to read, but knowing my liking for speculative fiction, my wife saw and snagged this volume at a flea market as a Christmas present for me a few years ago.
Recently, I pulled it out of the TBR piles as a "car book," to read aloud to her while we're between installments of a series we both like.
This actually is also part of a series, the Sherbrooke Brides, though Barb didn't know that when she bought it, But this installment at least reads perfectly well as a standalone, and that's how we approached it,
The Goodreads description just repeats the cover copy, which the author herself wrote, IMO, however, that cover copy was a misstep, because it gives us a lot of backstory which in the text of the book is gradually disclosed for effect that effect is simply lost when you already know about it.
It also gives details about plot developments that most readers would prefer to discover as they occur, Suffice it to
say that we have an enigmatic prologue, which a reference to "Queen Bess" pegs as set in the lates, where we meet shipwrecked sea captain Jared Vail, who takes on an unspecified "debt" to a mysterious sorcerer, and are also introduced to a beautiful little girl with a strange song, who tells him "I am your debt.
" Leaving us with more questions than answers, we then skip down to a London ballroom in, where two people with secrets,yearold Rosalind de la Fontaine and Jared's descendant Nicholas, the new Earl of Mountjoy, meet for the first time.
There's romantic attraction, but there's another agenda as well, and several layers of mystery,
Barb, by her own statement, would have rated this at five, but she experienced it in a censored version when I read aloud to her, I ignore or, if necessary, paraphrase or note, without repeating the cussing, and omit the explicit sex scenes.
To be fair, however, the cussing here is of the dword sort and only occasional, and the sex all takes place in marriage.
Coulter does endow both Nicholas and Rosalind's foster brother Grayson with a background of womanizing dalliances, which is apparently supposed to establish to female readers that they're sexually desirable astute female readers might be more apt to just roll their eyes.
At least one reviewer complained that the main characters had too much sex, but given that they were newlyweds, that's simply realistic, My only complaint would be that the explicitness wasn't necessary it violated the couple's privacy for no real narrative purpose, I admit that I did, just now, read/skim the parts I omitted in the first reading, but not with any salacious intent rather, just to verify, for review purposes, that the couple weren't doing anything disgusting or vile just things they'd prefer to be alone for.
My own reaction was less gushing, though I did like the book to a point, Coulter does do a good job of creating multiple webs of mystery, and pulling the reader's interest into them early on, Her characterizations are sharp across the board, not just of the two main characters and she has a dry sense of humor that several times had Barb laughing out loud, though the book isn't a comedy.
In places, it's a masterful novel of manners Jane Austen would have loved one dialogue in particular, The sympathetic characters were basically likeable and the unsympathetic ones thoroughly dislikable, Rosalind has more spice and sand to her than the usual Victorian heroine Victoria would actually come to the throne inthat may be what one reviewer was referring to when he complained that the book is "anachronistic.
" In that respect, that's probably not a wholly fair criticism human nature was the same inas it is now, and not all reallife Victorian females were subdued milksops.
The Pale is a rather original fantasy world, with a genuine sense of alien strangeness, The ending Epilogue was also very well done,
On the negative side, much of the dialogue here is unrealistic in places people would never say some of these things in real life.
The problem isn't so much that they're "anachronistic" although in, servants didn't talk to employers, nor total strangers to each other, as frankly as some of them do here as that they're inane or unrealistic in the context, as much so inas in.
Another major problem is that the "resolution" doesn't resolve a whole lot in some ways, There's a great deal of use of time relativity paradoxes, stopping time, blurring of identity between characters in ways that doesn't make sense.
This might appeal to Dr, Who fans, but I've never been a Whovian, The sorcerer Sarimund can communicate with our world and influence events when the writer needs him to for the plot, but can't when she needs him to be unable to there doesn't seem to be any other consistent law governing when he can or can't.
Despite the buildup, the climactic showdown doesn't really involve any major challenge or difficulty in that respect, it's more anticlimactic.
One character also undergoes a significant attitude change, but without any convincing explanation for it,
I think this was probably a passable introduction to Coulter's work, at least in this genre, As I said, I liked it for what it is, timepassing entertainment, But I didn't like it intensely enough that I'd seek out any more of her corpus, .