My favorite part of the worldbuilding was easily the Wood. I don't know, I love forests as a rule, but I also have a definite thing for dark malicious landscapes that change and corrupt or else just completely devour anyone who enters them. (Gee, is it any surprise that I'm also an avid Lovecraft reader?) Thoroughly enjoyed the origin story as well, though I did think that the whole situation was resolved a bit too easily in the end.
Now comes the complaint. And it'll probably seem weird that I'm spending so much time on a nitpick when I genuinely did like the book as a whole, but it's a nitpick that's already been picked and picked and picked several hundred too many times, if not more:
I really could have done without the Obligatory Romance.
Now, I really enjoyed watching Agnieszka and Sarkan bounce off of each other, from their first meeting when she was completely terrified of him because she didn't know what he wanted through their petty quarrels all the way until they actually learned how to get along and how much more powerful they could be if they worked together, not to mention admitting they actually cared about each other. Here's the thing, though - all of that still would have worked perfectly well if their relationship had been kept to that of master and apprentice. And this upsets me for a number of reasons:
-I think that platonic male-female relationships are really underexplored in fiction, and the master-apprentice front especially is one I've hardly ever seen done before. (Tenzin and Korra comes to mind, but practically nothing else.)
-Teacher-on-student severely squicks me out.
-The narrative utterly failed to convince me that they had actual chemistry - from where I was standing, it went from "they can't stand each other" to "Oh look, attraction."
-Yes, I understand that when one of the characters is immortal, or a member of a species that ages differently than humans, or has been frozen in time for multiple generations, there are automatically going to be different standards when it comes to age differences - but that still doesn't mean I'm going to accept that a centuries-old noble with his 17-year-old peasant apprentice is okay.
-I honestly thought that Agnieszka had better chemistry with Kasia.
Granted, I'll give it credit for actually acknowledging that platonic friendship is important, as opposed to another narrative pet peeve of mine where romantic love is treated as the only kind that matters. But... instead, I feel like it fell into the trap of showing me two girls who care about each other more than anyone else, will unthinkingly risk their lives for each other, and seem physically incapable of getting within arm's reach of each other without cuddling or holding hands, and expects me to believe that there's nothing going on between them except that they're really good friends. Then, this same narrative shows me two other characters who start their relationship with a massive power imbalance (though to the author's credit, at least it didn't stay that way) and can't seem to speak two words to each other without exchanging some sort of verbal jab, and expects me to buy that just because they're opposite sexes, in close proximity, and not related by blood, that somehow means they're romantically compatible. *headdesk*
...I'm not doing a very good job of selling this book, am I?
Okay, in spite of my whining I really did enjoy the story overall, and this is a complaint I have about just about every piece of popular media I consume. The rest of it was very much worth it - I liked the setting, for the most part I liked the characters, and I really want a sequel now about how Kasia put her life back together after her encounter with the Wood and how she ends up becoming the champion knight to two small royal children.
