It's not often that I don't finish a book, but this was one of them. For a combination of reasons, this book just wasn't fun to read, and I got about half of the way through before I decided to accept defeat and go and read something I'd enjoy more.

Some of the problems I hit with this that sapped the fun out of it for me were:

* The dialogue feels very stilted and unnatural - lots of short, choppy sentences, for example, and phrases that when you try saying them out loud, just don't sound right.

* I prefer learning about the characters and plot through the author showing me, rather than telling me. The balance in the half of the book I read is about 90% tell, 10% show.

* The pacing is seriously wonky. Sometimes, there are pages and pages of expositional history, and in other places, the characters move between two locations in the middle of a paragraph in a block of text, sometimes with the time of day shifting significantly as well (for example, a transition between talking somewhere in a village in the middle of the day at the start of a paragraph, to talking around a campfire in the wilds late at night at the end of the paragraph), which really screws with the flow of the text.

* Karan, the lead character, seems to vary between two major states - angry, and inconsistent. The veering back and forth is tiring, but often, it feels like there's no particular depth to her, or any effort to try and bring out other aspects of her character. I wouldn't say she feels like a caricature exactly, but again it was something that just felt tiring.

This book just wasn't for me.