Plot: hard to find thanks to all the plotholes, and highly predictable. There's no surprise, the only unknown factor is when certain things are going to happen. A lot of the time solutions are far too convenient to be realistic.

Characters: Black and white, no gray anywhere. One single character goes from good to bad at one point, but aside from that no-one ever changes or grows. The main issue that the characters don't seem affected by what happens to her. The central character goes from maiden to rape victim to whore to avenger to married respectable woman, and never changes in any way.

Style: The good thing: it improved after the first two hundred pages. The bad: it started from such a low level that even this improvement isn't enough. The worst offenders are constant point-of-view changes - every few paragraphs, enough to give you whiplash - and such a simplistic prose style that it's just not fun to read. Another issue is the idealized portrayal of the environment: no one ever worries about sexually transmitted diseases, no-one has unwanted babies, no-one really suffers from illnesses. Add to that a very casual use of sex and violence that never actually affects anything, and you get a book that leaves you unaffected.

Plus: Some of the side character plots are interesting, when they aren't abandoned.

Minus: Terrible style, a plot with no surprises whatsoever, and characters who make it impossible to care.

Summary: I have no idea why this is as popular as it is - it's an incredibly naive and simplistic book. ( )