Member Reviews
We have a known group of 3 sisters that are in Britain with a man who is waiting to marry one of them but she wants to find her father first. They go to Denmark first because she is part of the royalty, then the escape and go to another site and each time the healer is made out as a witch when birds do something or it rains or the wolves come and save them. It places them in Kiev where the rain comes and one of the sisters falls in love but leaves at this time. They end up in making a mess in Constantinople and end up back in Kiev.
As an avid reader of historical fiction and fantasy titles, I was drawn to the description of "The Day of Synne" by LP O'Bryan. A girl and her sisters on the search to prove their royal lineage-- my kind of book. The best thing I can say about this book: that is, in fact, the plot. However, I found this story immensely difficult to read.
The grammar was extremely poor. There were times I had to question if I had just read a run-on sentence and couldn't make sense of what was being said. There were also repetitive phrases, as well as redundancies when it came to describing plot points. The writing style was overall immature. Feelings were written robotically with no... heart or description.
In chapter one, the character simply states, "I felt I was going to die." What exactly was she feeling? There are so many lines like this in the story that could have been expanded upon to make a reader connect deeper with the story. Was her heart racing, was she panicked? We don't get any insight other than that vague sentence.
To expand upon the things that made very little sense to me and bring back the line mentioned above, at that point in the story, an eagle swoops down from the sky, and she felt like she was going to die. There is not enough evidence surrounding that incident to warrant such a dramatic-- yet vague-- reaction. I also felt like the story could have benefitted from a third person point of view instead of a first-person point of view. First person points of view do not typically bother me, this is not a standard preference of mine. Perhaps I felt it didn't fit with how little depth was written for the character?
All of this dramatically interrupted my flow of reading. I couldn't enjoy the story because I couldn't go more than two paragraphs at a time without becoming distracted by the poor grammar and trying to deduce what was actually important.
I was back and forth on who the intended audience was-- children? Adults? It felt like a story written for young adults, by children. If the prose was more mature, I would have been able to read without pause and follow the plot without distraction.