This is an excellent book! Every minute of it is filled with intrigue. There is action, mystery, romance; it even touches slightly on social issues. This is an excellent book for children, teens, and even adults. The writing style is well thought out, descriptive when needed yet fast-paced enough to preventing the reader from ever wanting to put the book down. All the characters are personable and well-developed. The plot is intricately woven into a wonderful web that pulls you into the center of this world. ( )

Thoroughly mediocre addition to an already bloated genre. The author commits several of the cardinal sins of fantasy: unnecessary maps, inconsistent use of dialect, and needless insertion of "foreign language" terms among them. Her "strong" heroine does nothing but run from danger and moon about lamenting her helplessness and regret for the mistakes of her past, while the plot is moved forward solely by the male characters. Luckily, the heroine is utterly and stunningly beautiful, pure, vivacious, simply "unlike anyone else" etc. etc, as the author is only too happy to remind us at every possible juncture.

These problems are further compounded by Hanley's curious inability to use the pluperfect and future perfect tenses, and her general laziness (to wit: she sets up many interesting actions scenes, only to elide them with '* * *' before moving on to the next tedious bit of exposition).


I recommend avoiding this book, but have chosen to give it two stars because, for all its faults, it was not written by R.A. Salvatore. ( )

This was not bad, but didn't really stand out from the rest of the generic YA fantasy which is around.. Silly fantasy people names that I don't remember, and they spent most of the book traipsing from one end of the country to the other, but the hero, she was feisty, and that's always a plus.

In this book King Kareed searches for the legendary sword of Bellandra, and wins it from the King of Bellandra. He kidnaps the prince, Landen, and brings him to his daughter as a slave. His daughter, Torina, sets Landen free and they become close friends. Then she starts to see deadly visions in her crystal. It is up to her to save her family and her kingdom.
The characters are flat and not fully developed, and the book is very predictible. This book is definitely not a must-read, there are far better books to spend your time reading. ( )

This was a great read. A Prince and Princess from different societies meet as slave and princess and through the bonds they forge here later events are shaped. ( )