This book so did not work for me. Okay, so the story line itself had potential. It was catchy, interesting, the blurb sounded great. What really gave this book its cringe worthy moments were the characters, and I swear there were multiple moments where I had to put the kindle down, take a few breaths and work up the motivation to keep reading...Finnie, the main character, was a total Mary Sue, IMO. In her own humble opinion, she's absolutely gorgeous, she's loaded and everyone loves her. In her words: 'He liked me. In fact, most of the village of Houllebec did. And the only people in the village (that I know of) who didn't were people I had not met' Because of course everyone who meets her falls instantly in love with her. For crying out loud, less than three pages later she's telling us about how people are in 'fits of ecstasy' because she's around. She speaks like she's eight years old, with her 'holy molys!', her extensive use of the phrases 'ho boy'and 'eek!' and her clear mastery of run-on sentences. In fact, a notable example of one such sentence would be where she describes a set of statues in a church. This single sentence used 128 words. One sentence. 128 words. Broken up by enough commas and semicolons to do your head in. It was nightmarish to read...and don't even get me started on how many brackets were used in this book for the most stupid reasons...oh yeah, and Finnie also thinks that corsets and boned underwear are more comfortable than normal underwear. And she insists on spending paragraphs describing said underwear to the reader. Because, obviously, right? Urgh. I'm just going to stop ranting about Finnie now...
And move on to Frey Drakkar. He's set up as a total bad ass, hard case, alpha hero guy who also happens to be rockin the whole viking-raider vibe. But he is just way too unrealistic to be a believable, likeable character. Just take a look at some of the stuff he says to Finnie, like: 'Wife, arse over here', and 'Arse. Home.' But he seems to have no problem holding eloquent conversations on other pages, so clearly he only goes all caveman-no-speak some of the time. And he's the Gary Stu to Finnie's Mary Sue. I mean, this guy is (supposedly) the supreme ruler of dragons and elves, as well as the overlord of a rich, powerful House. Oh yeah, and he is described as 'perhaps the most wanted man in the land'. And everyone respects him because despite the fact that he's a raider, he's a good raider and only raids for the benefit of the country. Which is great. But seriously,is there nothing wrong with him?!
The other thing that really bothered me was the reactions of Finnie's 'parents' (who aren't her real parents, just their equivalents in a parallel world), when they discover that their only daughter is gone for good. Okay, so I dunno, but you'd expect them to be more upset right? Instead, they just seem to roll with it and accept Finnie as a (totally) better replacement, despite the fact that these so called 'twins' are completely different.freaking.people. who just happen to look the same.
Look, I'm just going to stop ranting now. Basically, my point is that this book, IMHO, is grammatically flawed, with undeveloped characters and a somewhat entertaining storyline.