I found this book to be a fascinating tale of a girl finding herself against all odds; I did however find the main character’s storytelling to be quite lacking in detail making it difficult to recognise with other characters in the book. I also very much enjoyed the links to popular Russian Folklaw and customs; including the reference of Babba Yaga. It is a truly imaginative book that is superbly written with great picturesque scenery that are described so vividly the reader is able to see them in their minds.
Anouk is a young girl with no family who finds herself running from an arranged marriage and enters a village that has been cursed. She is not a normal girl in that she is trained in herbs and a good horse rider, Anouk is very much a character out of a fairytale and if you ask me she is fairly similar to ‘Merideth’ from Disney’s ‘Brave’. I did however find it quite difficult to believe that she had fallen in love as I thought it was almost a snap decision and the other two options for her could have just as easily be the boy she’d fallen in love with. I also found it slightly more difficult to recognise other characters since the story was very much told from Anouk’s perspective and the descriptive passages were of the scenery; meaning that other than the very little dialogue Anouk had with other characters I was not entirely sure of very much about the secondary characters.
The secondary characters mentioned in this book are not in my opinion written in enough detail that I can review them.
The pacing in this book is lacking a little as I felt that not much was happening a lot of the time while reading this book. I did however enjoy that the book left it until the very last minute to give the main character any ideas of how to continue and have an adventure.
The storyline was very interesting and adventurous; I thought the storyline along with the beautiful description of scenery was the best thing about this book. While it did at times feel like there was nothing happening there was always a sense that the book was leading up to something.
A mixture of high points and low points, 3.5 star rating.
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