Daughter of the Centaurs - Kate Klimo

The idea behind this book had such promise. Centaurs, the last human, leathery winged bat things. It all spells out excitement doesn't it?

It pains me to write a bad review, it does. But here it goes...

This story falls flat. The writing is mostly poor. It doesn't flow well. There were some points of the book, but not until after the half way point, where the author seemed to have found her flow. However, those points were few and far between. Sadly, this book probably also should have been written in the first person. I truely believe that changing the perspective that it was written in would have prevented much of the awkwardness that the writing seemed to have caused.

Now, if the flow of the writing wasn't horrible enough, the sense of time in this book was also a complete disaster. I wanted to know more about Malora after she was sent out into the wilderness, but that apparently was not going to happen. Instead, we get sprung forward a few years into the future bypassing any obvious hardships she had to have had (and these hardships were never really mentioned, so as far as the reader is concerned, Malora adapted flawlessly to her new environment).

Then there were the awkward visions. Letting us view tidbits here and there of things. Tidbits of things we get to learn nothing more about! Let us not forget to mention the plot points that were introduced that didn't go any where. I can only imagine how great the book would have been if it had followed some of those rather than the uninteresting one it did follow along. All of these unanswered bits are probably going to come up in future books in the series, but the was it was executed was absurd.

Then there are the characters. They are all flat, flat, flat. The Centaurs are so ridiculously boring and awkward. And yes, I understand Malora was supposed to have grown and changed over time, but really her character didn't seem to fit at all from the first half of the book to the second. Then, to make it worse, the author didn't really take time to take the reader through the transformation of Malora. You are just kind of there. I guess this error is thanks to the disasterous timeline flow.

And please, I do not want to hear anymore of this book being a dystopian. A good dystopian is one where you can see how the world you are in today can become the world you are reading about. Yes, this world is supposed to be the one I am in, in the future. Filled with Centaurs and other exotic creatures. Too much fantasy is built in for this to be a good dystopian, so I really hope people stop trying to say that it is one.

I give this book at most 1.5 stars out of 5.



This review based on an ARC of Daughter of the Centaurs by Kate Klimo