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.
