-slow start
-DNF quit at page 47
-sounded promising but took too long to get going for me ( )

Had an interesting premise, but I found the story and characters shallow. I was also confused how they seem to be a less-advanced, post apocalypse us, but still quote Jane Austen and Shakespeare. ( )

Malora Thora-Jayke is the last of her kind; the only human left in existence. She is perfectly happy this way until she is found by a herd of centaurs. They entrap her and her horses, in order to win the Golden Horse, a coveted trophy. Earned by horse racing, something which seems exceedingly dull and stupid to Malora. Through her capture Malora finds herself a new family, she feels the centaurs are the perfect blend of horse and human. She is home.

This book was intriguing to say the least. Though the year is never discussed by the name dropping of famous people, it takes place in a not so distant future, or quite possibly an alternate present. I would absolutely read the next book.

( )

An entertaining if not entirely successful book.

The plot starts well enough then takes needless and sometimes absurd turns.
I got the sense that, by its subject matter, this book was meant to be Young Adult, but the writing is too simplistic. Don't get me wrong, you don't need big words to convey big emotions and there were certainly several descriptive passages that proved just that. But the characters' motives, the plot itself, were too simple and it was sometimes jarring to read mentions of rape and murder in a child-like prose.

Malora, the main character, is a mix of wild child (a part of her that was well-written and compelling) and Mary-Sue (a part which, obviously, was not). You have an extremely pragmatic character, who will not cry for her father's death or the destruction of her people because life goes on and she needs a level head to survive, then later on takes to her bed in a fit of tears because some minor character she
barely knew gets himself banished for his own stupidity (an event for which she absurdly blames herself when in similar situations back in her village she'd brush it off and recognise the ridiculousness of it all). Her behaviour, even given all the changes she goes through, was not credibly consistent.

The centaur society had a lot of potential to be explored, especially the whole issue of class differences, but it never gets the attention it should.
The culmination of the story ends up being a horse race which, not only plunges the impoverished centaurs into deeper poverty keeping us from rejoicing over her victory (though that's later resolved), but also ends up being anticlimactic given that the book opened with a horrible attack from winged demons.

I really liked the whole scents and visions aspect of the story, I hope the next one will explore this.

Still, this one was a light and nice read. ( )

The horrifying thing is that the cover isn't 100% whitewashed. This is set in a dystopian future Africa, in which the polar ice caps have expanded to cover at least as far south as England, and yet the cover model looks Mediterraean — green eyes, olive skin — and yet the description in the text is that her skin is "red-brown". What the actual fuck. Like, the further into this you go, the worse it gets.

The literature which has survived (preserved by fauns, wtf) is Western canon — Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Shakespeare, Epicurus — none of the potentially interesting class, race, free will, etc., issues are ever unpacked, the heroine's motivations are opaque at crucial moments, the supporting cast is largely made up of stock characters who aren't written against the trope's grain, and all in all, this does not have much except the premise (which is never explored) to recommend it. ( )