One Mini-Review & Three DNFs: Stormdancer, Under the Mound, Hild, His Last Duchess

Somehow I have gotten behind with a couple reviews and realized that I have a small stack of books needing some comment.  Let's play catch up!  Whee!

Mini-Review:  Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff.

Not sure why I didn't write a full-length review of this book.  Great heroine, exciting world, interesting characters, adventure, intrigue - and a griffin!  What's not to like?  It seems like the greater blogosphere is reading this; it won't be hard to find decent reviews if you want a more robust one.  4+ out of 5 stars.








Now for the DNFs.
Under the Mound by Cynthia Heinrichs

 A book about mysterious goings-on at a famous cairn mound in Scotland - this should be great!  For whatever reason, I couldn't find the hook in this story.  Perhaps it was just a case of "right book at the wrong time" but I didn't make it more than 50 pages in before I lost interest.  I'm still intrigued enough by it to consider reading it another time, but I'm not sure it'll be high priority.






Hild by Nicola Griffith

After seeing a review on NPR.org I had to read this story about a 7th(?) century saint.  Alas, this book is written in a style that I have a hard time reading, breaking my emotional attachment to any character with startling regularity.  Both sentences and paragraphs are long-winded, sometimes requiring multiple readings of the same chunk of text over and over to "get it."  AND there's a glossary - which you will almost certainly need to use to understand parts of the text.  Other people seem to have loved this book, but it didn't work for me.




His Last Duchess by Gabrielle Kimm

I think I wasn't in the mood for this when I started to read it.  What starts out as a story about political alliances in renaissance Italy quickly devolves into "drama" about a husband's inability to consummate his marriage.  I picked up historical fiction and got a melodramatic romance novel instead. Maybe another time.  Maybe not.