Poor. Just turgid writing that drags meanders and jumps about with very little actually happening. I usually like descriptive prose, and am a fan of many authors who have a slower writing style but this was a step too far. I believe it's second in a series, but I'm certainly not going to read the others, and it seemed quite understandable on it's own.

A day after finishing and it's made so little impression on me that I can't even remember our hero's name. He's a bit of an oaf anyway, and perhaps in the previous book he'd journeyed from some village in search of his mother and had an adventure with fairies. He's now in the big city, but out of work and out of luck. He's made a bit of living by fighting in taverns, but he's so inept he can't even throw a fight when it's in his own interest. Random friends and drinking acquaintances keep bailing him out of difficulty but it's very hard to understand how he knows these people who appear and then aren't seen again for vast swathes of the book. It takes more than half the book for the plot to progress beyond this, when he goes on an adventure with a newly met cousin. They're searching for a flower thought to embue the wearer with luck and prosperity. This quest makes little difference to oaf's prospects and he's eventually recruited into the guard only to mess that up too, and also casts away the only consistent characters we've had in his friend Evie. After that the city errupts into a coup and oaf finds out why some events occurred at the beginning of the book that he'd not observed.

There are all sorts of asides thrown into the writing, telling rather than showing the motivations of side characters, but oaf is oblivious to it all.

Just Avoid. ( )