In this, the first book of the Mapwalkers Series, Sienna Farren inherits her grandfather's map shop when he's murdered. Yes, this is the tedious trope "You're a wizard, Harry" kind of story, where a kid is raised in complete ignorance of their supernatural power. Nonetheless, it seemed like it might be a worthy read, but I was quickly disabused of that quaint notion.
Despite it being crystally-clear from the off who the villain is here, no one, least of all Sienna, who of course is a special snowflake with legendary powers, can see it. Wouldn't it be nice if once, the one with the special powers is actually smart and perceptive? No such luck here.
Sienna learns that she can 'map walk' - that is, can go to places in time and space using maps - and her "specialness" is that she can even do it based on nothing more than a map in her head. The villains are people who use the skins of other map-walkers to draw their own special maps and of course there's a 'shadowland' that they want to open the borders to - and of course Sienna is the only one who can stop them.
Despite having zero training or even any clue what she's doing, Sienna exhibits heroic powers from the off, and despite landing in the HQ of the villains, wherein several vital skin maps are hung on the walls, neither Sienna nor her companion - an experienced map walker - think for a split second of destroying or of taking these maps, to limit the powers and abilities of their enemy.
It's a no-brainer, but these two girls evidently have no brains. It made me want to quit reading the story there. While I don't mind a good story about someone who starts out dumb and wises up, I really don't appreciate stories by female authors about dumb women who start out dumb and bask in it throughout the story, consistently making bad decisions that even a moderately intelligent person in real life would avoid like the plague.
The story seems to revel in how gory and stomach-churning it could be, and that along with the fact that it really had no saving graces, and was larded with trope characters exhibiting predictably idiotic behaviors forced me to DNF this after maybe a third of it. I can't commend it based on what I could stand to listen to.
