Touch of Power by Maria V. Snyder

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


A fantasy adventure that had a promising start, but got lost, and lost all of its appeal half way through.

The first half of this book looked like an ‘okay’ fantasy adventure, with a promise of some romance, and admittedly less-than-average writing. The world-building was not bad, if not very deep; there was a lot of phrasing that felt too modernistic to fit with the setting, and characters did not really feel very interesting or developed… but most of it felt more or less passable.
Unfortunately, from around the middle of the book, it then all went down the drain. The time progression, events sequences, felt random and mangled. More and more things felt unnatural, like the way they kept getting captured and released, and the reasons for both. It became tiring to follow. It was already increasingly difficult to keep myself interested in reading on, and then a character of a type I practically hate the most got introduced (a nasty manipulative egomaniac), and I found myself skimming pages just to get it over with.
Also, the whole idea of people having sex for the first time, and more, while one of them is dying form a plague (and due to die in few days) actually made me uncomfortable. I don’t find it romantic, don’t like how it was done, or how romance was done in this story in general.
I though there were some promising ideas at first, but overall it turned out to be very disappointing.



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