I Gave Up - Jacket Description Misleading It is very rare that I don't finish a book, but this is one of them. The book jacket made this novel sound so interesting and it had a great initial start. The first few pages were riveting and fast-paced and described the coup and Tathea's escape. There were so many episodes in the book where you had to suspend belief and forget any thoughts of realistic plot. Her escape from the "assasins" was one of thos e scenes.
I read about 325 pages of this book before I realized it was not going to get better. If the book had kept on the path of a fantasy adventure (which was what the jacket alluded to), I would have kept reading. This book is only a small part fantasy, which by the way was often interesting. This book is basically a religious allegory/parable/novel.
The jacket description is very misleading and must have been written by someone who wanted to sell a lot of books to people who enjoy fantasy. I do enjoy religion-based novels, but only when I WANT to read them, not when I have been tricked into reading them. Even so, I still don't think this book worked on a religious novel level. It was VERY repetitive and very boring.
Bored Now... Preachy, meandering, and hard to follow are the descriptions that I would use to describe "Tathea". Some parts were interesting, but they kept being interrupted with long philosophical treatises on the Bible...er... "Book". I was hoping for something along the lines of Guy Gavriel Kay. Boy, was I wrong.I really tried to like this book - it didn't work Like another reviewer, I made it to almost 300 pages before I gave up. I bought the 2nd book in the series BEFORE I knew it was part of a series. I dislike reading books out of sequence. Thankfully, I checked this one out of the library vs paying my hard-earned cash. The first few pages regarding the coup and Tathea's escape seemed SO promising, especially if you suspend belief and expectations of a degree of realism. Like another reviewer, when her bodyguard was killed and the other "assasins" found her at the old lady's hut and believed that story...well, let's just say that was stretching it quite a bit. I slogged on. You're probably wondering why I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 star. The parts of the book that read like a real fantasy adventure were often interesting, but those parts were few and far between. I would not even have minded the religious content, but there was TOO much of it for a supposedly "fantasy" novel. This was a very misleading book and I found myself reading the jacket to see if I had missed something that would indicate this was religious fiction. Even so, I would still prefer books by Frank Peretti (This Present Darkness) over this writing. This was my first reading of this author and I don't know whether I will try another book. Too many fish in the sea for that! :-)
