This took me weeks to get through because I stopped listening to it for a period of time. I didn't like the narration, in particular certain voices of hers. It drove me nuts that Udo, no matter how sincere he was being, always sounded extremely condescending. A lot of the writing was straight up AWFUL. Someone else said that the shortenings of words like "sandwich" into "sanwies" (?? I can't remember it that was it exactly, since I didn't have the text in front of me) drove them insane. I hated that so much, as well as Flora calling the loo the "potty", like she's a two-year-old. Every time Udo said "pigface", I actually rolled my eyes. Ridiculous, made up cuss words are among one of my many fantasy book pet peeves.

I found most of the characters pretty unlikeable, including at times Flora. Were we supposed to become sympathetic toward Valefor? I found him pretty underhanded and awful throughout the entire thing, no excuses. The book was awfully drawn out on the whole Valefor-Flora storyline, particularly as the reader could sense that whole thing imploding in Flora's face from the very beginning.

I would have preferred if the book had focused more on Flora's parents. All the stuff with her father I found pretty interesting, but I also wanted to know more about her mother and the whole thing around the first Flora. I suspect that'll come up in the other two books, which I'm pretty sure I will not be reading or listening to.

There were aspects of the world that I appreciated -- Flora is a strong young heroine. There was no romance. Her mother is the general of Califa. There were many very dark elements to the story, and that was pretty cool in a children's book. But the book was also longwinded. I spent a long time wishing that I could just get to the end already. I can certainly see why children would like this story -- it has magic and pirates and soldiers (a little too much military stuff for me), but perhaps as an adult, I just had no patience for this.