This was an audiobook - evidently the first of a series although I did not realize that going into it, which annoyed the hell out of me. The 'After the Rift Book One' label on the book cover was hardly intelligible in the ad offering the audiobook for sale at a discount, so I didn't notice it. I picked up the book because it sounded really interesting. Had I known it was first in a series I probably would not have picked it up because I would have known that it was inevitably a prologue in which no mystery was solved and the story would have gone nowhere beyond world building. Very few series really get me interested in following them. Typically, they're too long, too boring, and too unimaginative and derivative. I don't want to read the same story over and over with nothing but a few tweaks in between, which is what series are for the most part.
With a title about a palace of lost memories a reader naturally expects something mysterious and a resolution, but neither appeared. The story moved excruciatingly slowly and had way too much dillydallying, and instead of a mystery it came across as a romance, which I for one didn't appreciate at all. Nevertheless I kept listening in the hope that something interesting would show up to explain why all the denizens of the palace had memories which had been blanked prior to the point when the palace showed up. I never got that, and the story ended rather abruptly without even addressing the lost memories portion of it. It was teased several times, but it never was really discussed and it sure didn't get resolved because this is a series and the author has to stretch it out to milk the readers for as much cash as she can. I do not appreciate that, and I do not support books like that.
The book began - and despite being first person it was read pretty decently by Marian Hussey - with the mystery of a large place suddenly arising out of nowhere with no sign of anyone building it. That ought to have caused a sensation of curiosity and even fear among the locals, but inexplicably it didn't. Everyone just seemed to accept that this was normal despite the story having done nothing to introduce or establish any magical elements or precedents.
What was even more odd though was that no one seemed to have ever heard of this king or his palace or at least knew nothing about him. It was like a magical palace plopping down from nowhere was a normal thing in this neighborhood. What, no one owned the land it appeared on? No one had an issue with that?! No one - not even the local nobility - knew anything about the king or his past so they could fill in the blanks for the palace personnel?
The only mystery that this story focused on was that of a Lady - the king's fiancée, evidently - being poisoned and the only person who could cure her was the father of the main character, Josie. Josie was a midwife with physican skills who assisted her father, a doctor, but who was, as we were constantly reminded, ineligible to be a doctor herself because she was a woman. This is how Josie lucked-in to become a persona grata at the palace, yet despite her frequently coming through for them with treatments and cures, the king never once upped and changed the law so that she could be a doctor. That was something I'd expected to happen in this story, and I was disappointed that it didn't.
The other oddity about the novel was that Josie and her father were supposedly well-known and liked in the town which at times seems like a village and at others like a city. For example, despite being beloved and knowing the town like the back of her hand, at one point Josie perceives that she's being followed and runs off, switching directions randomly to escape and ends up lost in a very sordid part of town, where apparently no one knows her and she doesn't know this area at all! It made no sense given the cozy view of the 'village' we'd had before. Worse, the guy who is following her is purportedly not a bad guy, yet he doesn't lift a finger to help her in her predicament. Again, it made no sense.
The book description, evidently once again written by some dickhead who never read the book claims, "In the search for the truth, Josie is drawn deeper into danger, and the answers she seeks might shake the very foundations of the kingdom." No, she's never actually in any danger until the very close of the book, and that's resolved before you can even start to feel concerned for her. Besides, she's the main character and she's also telling the story in first person, so how can anything harmful possibly befall her? That's one more reason why first person is typically a fail for me. And nothing happens that even remotely threatens the very foundations of the kingdom. Once again, the blurb lies.
Add to all of this the rather dull characters and it makes me want to yawn. Josie's love interest, Captain Hammer may as well have been a hammer for all the emotion he exhibits and Josie is hardly any better, showing herself not to be smart, but to be impulsive and foolish as often as not. It's not someone I want to read any more about, and I lost any interest I'd initially had in the mystery of the lost memories. Do I want to keep reading a series that fails to actually address the main topic the series is supposed to be about? Do I want to be led by the nose, continually betrayed by an author who baits one thing and switches the entire story to another? No! I can't commend this as a worthy read at all.
