Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Sigh. It seems all publishers of fantasy fiction need these days are a books with bunch of tropes lifted from Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Sherwood Smith, GRR Martin, and even relative newbies such as JK Rowling, Megan Whalen Turner and Naomi Novik, and a "plain, unremarkable, ordinary heroine" (the exact opposite of the old Mary Sue, now one in her own right), and voila! A new bestselling fantasy world is born! Except it isn't. The only fully fleshed out character in this trilogy is Nikolai/Sturmhond; at least he's somewhat amusing and seems to be in possession of himself while having actual credible human feelings. Everyone else, especially the romance-novelish central pair Alina and Mal (ridiculously referred to in prefaces and codas as "the boy and the girl," which I guess is supposed to be cute but merely infantilises the heroes) is totally two-dimensional and derivative. Compare the annoyingly, repeatedly, willfully stupid Alina to the real heroines in works by the above mentioned authors; she doesn't stand comparison to any of them. She's a cypher, boring, AND an idiot; and the author spends far more time talking about her hair (mousy, the "gloriously" white), her various amazing robes, and her "forbidden" attraction to the villain than making her a believable, sympathetic, flesh-and-blood protagonist with which a reader can become invested. Reading this trilogy has taught me NOT to trust certain friends' taste and judgement. Ugh.