It's not often I'd criticize something for being too realistic, but as this series developed, it had a very odd split personality. On the one hand, it's a nicely-done but fairly generic swords and sorcery young adult novel, with evil dukes, magic spells, and mountain gods. On the other hand, Alanna's romantic life is just as messy and complex as in a modern high school novel, with odd stops and starts and relationships that just kind of start up and/or peter out. I have no problem with those kinds of relationship tangles in a story, but it was oddly jarring in a book that also featured a purple-eyed telepathic cat, for example. This is especially true when all the secondary characters have more genre-expected relationships (everyone but Alanna meets the person they're meant to be with and is in love with them pretty much at first sight). The schism between the two tones got increasingly distracting as the series continued, and I sometimes got annoyed that "who does Alanna end up with" seemed like the most complex and important issue in the book.