Rating: WARTY!
Read indifferently by Leanne Yau, this audiobook started out quite engagingly, but proved to be such a plodding story after reading a little further into it that I DNF'd it after chapter 25, which was about halfway through. I had thought I'd make it to the end and give it a positive review, but the problem was that the story was slow, and main character Rachel's constant and repetitive dissection of events became thoroughly tedious and irritating in short order. I really began to dislike her and the inevitable an unoriginal male interest, named ridiculously, Kale. The predictability of the story on top of Rachel's stupidity was a big negative for me, too.
Set in a fantasy medieval world where there are X-men...um mutant children...who have unlikely powers, such as the usual sketchy ability to see the future, fire coming from someone's hands, and so on, was not something I would reject the novel out of hand for, but how an author handles these things is important and clearly this author had no intention of offering any sort of an explanation for the powers. Additionally, the disgust and rejection of such mutant children by the villagers was predictable, but a likely consequence, especially back in such superstitious times.
The problem here was that the complete lack of anyone who might have been even slightly sympathetic was far too much of an extreme, but it's what authors predictably do in such stories and it's inauthentic. I mean there were so many of these 'mutant' children that it was hard to believe they were so universally rejected. It's like everyone is the same and there are no gray areas, and I'm so tired of that trope - and of authors who are so lacking in imagination that they cannot make it a bit more realistic.
Talking of which, I had to wonder who these stories were aimed at because it read like middle grade, Rachael being barely high-school age, and Cephy, the younger mutant she took up with, about ten years old, yet the story was discussing torture and rape and so on, as though this were a young adult or new adult novel. Anyway, the plot has it that the two girls are not welcome in the city because of Cephy's wanton destruction of her entire family in a burning incident when she got pissed off, and form which semes seems to ahve suffered no negative consequences whatseover. So they escape into the nearby forest, pursued by the White Guard, sent by King Eric and these guys are so caricatured that they could be cartoon characters. Cephy also burns those dudes to a crisp.
They're taken in by a witch who seems welcoming, but who you know from the start has her own agenda and it's not favorable to the kids. Unaccountably this witch hands them over to 'heroic guy' Kale for no apparent reason, and this is supposedly the good guy, yet he creeps around scaring Rachael without any rationale for his behavior at all. He's the trope creepy love interest who is always there as though he's stalking Rachael, yet while she agonizes over every possible threat to her and Cephy, she never once thinks there's anything wrong with his behavior. Go figure.
One major problem with Rachael is that she has supposedly lived on the streets of the city for most of her years, yet she seems dumb as a brick at times with no street smarts whatsoever, and her so-called visions of the future are the usual clichéd half-assed vague 'seeings' that really tell her nothing useful at all and are essentially no better than a hunch. She claims at one point not to rely on them, and at another how reliable they are so again, go figure!
I realize of course I'm not of the youthful age range this story is aimed at (whatever that is), but for my own perspective, I had no interest in finishing this, let alone reading a whole series of this nature, so I cannot commend it based on my experience of it. The acronym for the title is RotS, and that's how it went for me I'm sorry to report.
