Review: Third Daughter

Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This story was sort of all over the place.

First off, although it bills itself as a romance...eh I would say that that part of the story line was tenuous at best. It sort of felt a bit tagged on just to give easy reasons for some of the character's actions. The author could have easily just said that Aniri was 17 and not really into the idea of getting married, instead wanting to travel and track down her father's killers and that reasoning would have worked just as well as a motivator.

I also had to keep reminding myself that Aniri was 17 and thus prone to making bad choices, although I found it hard to believe that she had never bothered to learn anything about the politics of her court or the surrounding lands at any point. You would have thought that someone who seemed so interested in traveling would have bother to sit down one afternoon and read a bit about the places she was interested in.

And perhaps that's the biggest weak spot in the book, everything seems to have been cobbled together with a basic idea without much in the way of addressing some of the deeper issues of world and character building. At no point was I clear on if the story was happening on earth in some sort of steampunk version of India or if it was happening on another planet. I mean, great we aren't in Victorian England for once, but where the heck are we? I found myself constantly second guessing the world building and technology due to uncertain geography and thus never quite getting into the flow of the story.

That said, some of the settings and tech was interesting, the story perfectly serviceable, although Anrir got pretty irritating and some of the other side characters had me rising my eyebrows. There was a lot of repetition in the last bit of the book like the author realized that she needed to finish the book and wasn't quite sure how to get there in a timely manner.

Overall, if there had been a bit clearer idea just where the world was it would have improved the story as a whole.

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