Review: The Beholder

The Beholder by Anna Bright
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 rounded up.

Selah only wants to help keep her people fed and happy. Their little colony is only scraping by, and she knows her duty is to marry a good, hard working man who will help her take her father's place and led her people. When the man she expects to marry her turns her down, though, she's plunged into a humiliating journey across the sea in search of a husband, in a game between her stepmother and the dreaded Baba Yaga she knows nothing about.



This should have been an amazing read. It's so confused, though, it turned me off a little. As near as I can tell, this is set in a world where England abandoned the Colonies before they could declare Independence. In fact England doesn't seem to have much of an empire at all any more. But also a lot of folklore is happening all at once; Arthur, surrounded by several of the Knights, is in England, and in what's probably Norway she visits Asgard and meets various members of the pantheon, except they don't actually seem to be gods, just people with the gods' names. The overarching villain is known as Baba Yaga and it's never clear (at least to me) whether she is called that because of the mythological figure, or whether the myth doesn't exist there. All the European countries have different names, and while I could puzzle most of them out by context I'm still lost on a few. A map would have been amazingly helpful; maybe the print version will have one.

But it's not all bad. Selah grows into an amazing character, and her determination to return home is never less than endearing. A couple of her suitors are good as well, obvious twist with one aside. Sadly I didn't really follow the political subplot, possibly because, again, I couldn't place the countries involved.

I did enjoy it overall, and I'll watch out for the sequel, because naturally there's a cliffhanger. Not a horrible one, though, so there's that going for it.

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