Not as good as the first book in the trilogy, mostly hampered by its language. Our heroine has left the lower classes for the Court, and Dart-Thornton's version of formal language is tangled without period, which does not convince as the courtesies of a thousand-year-old dynasty. There's plenty of panoply, some probably Burgundian some suggesting Versailles, but strings of rare words are not as lovely as strings of pearls.
The book also has some plot problems common to second volumes—worst, that many dramatic events were so strongly foreshadowed in the first volume to be a letdown now—but plenty of plot to go on with. And, when it slows, the characters tell each other classic folktales, and there's a bibliography of sources in the back.
ISBN: 044652803X
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