Meanwhile, The Ill-Made Mute is much better written than the other pfaff I've been reading. In fact, Ms Dart-Thorton is positively verbose. I think she's Italian, or something. Never use one word when you can use four paragraphs. I wouldn't mind it, except this verbosity seems to be hiding the fact that there's bugger-all actually happening.

The story is sort of a meld of Robin Hobb and Mervyn Peake (yes, Gormenghastliness - it's got his Dickens-on-crack sort of gothic tinge) and a huge slug of Celtic mythology. Seelie faeries and daonie sidhe and other unusual blends of vowels all over the place. It's... I dunno. I don't quite like it. The characters aren't really all that interesting to me. At half-way through, there were really only two of them. Now the love interest's popped up (two thirds of the way through - he believes in being fashionably late) and he's some sort of laughable cross between Aragorn (big, tough and manly!) and Legolas (cat-like, silent and lithe!). In general, it's getting a Tolkien-esque feel to it, now (which, as you know if you know me, is not necessarily a good thing at all). But they're just wandering through the wilderness, having random encounters with faeries. Long-term plot? What's that?

So, in summation, it's a 'beautiful tapestry of mythology' and crap like that, but I'm not sure it's a good story.