weave my words into worlds

I've waited way too long to review this. It should be more like 2.5 stars.

At first, Eventide seemed like the perfect book for me. It gave me a nice escape and had a variety of character types. Now, I'm not saying I hated the book, but it got worse as it went on and several things just didn't sit right with me. Some of my annoyances may have been blown out of proportion due to the fact that I read the last 150 pages with a painful IV in my arm during a 4-hour glucose test.

I liked the premise. It seemed a tiny bit far-fetched, but a bard collecting stories to tell a dragon in order to keep said dragon from burning down a village? Sure. I'll go along with it.

However, the premise itself turned out to contribute to one of the book's faults. It really was just a collection of stories. None of them had much to do with each other and ended up seeming almost pointless, especially because the dragon still came at the end. That was another thing. The prologue made this big deal of Edvard having a year to go back to see the dragon and tell him all the stories, but then we never even found out if Edvard did go and the dragon was just a liar or if Edvard just forgot about the whole point of his journey.

Some parts baffled me a bit, too. Like the ending? A character death came out of nowhere and I couldn't even figure out when it had happened or how, but it seemed like I was supposed to be upset about it. And the whole murder trial never made sense either. I never understood why they chose the verdict they did--there were too many characters masquerading as other characters to keep track of.

I liked Jarod because he was a boring person without being a totally boring character, but the whole "Lie to the girl of your dreams! Pretend to be someone you're not! That'll work out for sure!" cliché was thrown in and it ticked me off that Edvard suggested it and that Jarod fell for it.

There were so many things that were just never explained. Caprice and her sisters were "wish women" or whatever you called them, but we never found out why the well broke or how the family had anything to do with watching over the well. I wanted to like Caprice, and she seemed like a somewhat decent female character, but every time she came into the story I just got confused.

This rant is kind of going nowhere. Suffice it to say that Eventide felt incomplete and confusing and I just didn't end up satisfied. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it or not.