isa_mclaren's review
2.0
This book could benefit greatly from some editing and proofreading. There are numerous minor mistakes of punctuation. I don't just mean missing or too many commas. I mean, a period in the middle of a sentence. Or, a pronoun and a name used as if it was a re-write that didn't quite get changed. The worst part was a character described as having lavender skin in one chapter, only to be referred to as green-skinned in the next chapter.
It's a shame, because the story is good. It's rich and compelling and the book could be so much better.
Also, this is the first in a series, which I didn't know when I started it.
It's a shame, because the story is good. It's rich and compelling and the book could be so much better.
Also, this is the first in a series, which I didn't know when I started it.
shayboote's review
5.0
I Loved this story. I love it when a story is fresh and unique, this one was both.
stevethomas's review
4.0
The Goblin Market opens with a prologue ripped out of Grimm's Fairy Tales. A girl, wandering away from her boyfriend, stumbles upon a goblin market, where she is tricked into sampling the food. Soon, she is kidnapped by goblins, and it's up to her sister to enter the faerie world to save her.
The fairy tale aspects of the book were wonderful. Everything functions by the same crazy, but somehow coherent logic as it does in the stories you heard as a child. The worldbuilding was well-done, but sparse, although the scarcity of information often added to the mystique of the world. The villain of the novel channeled David Bowie's performance in Labyrinth. On top of that the prose was beautiful.
On the negative side, some of the characters only showed up long enough to leave. My favorite, a boisterous fairy warrior, vanishes from the book in the blink of an eye. Another issue, and this is largely a pet peeve, was the name of the male lead, Him. Seeing "Him" as the subject of a sentence just kept setting off my grammar alarm, and drew me out of the story. It's petty, but it bothered me.
The fairy tale aspects of the book were wonderful. Everything functions by the same crazy, but somehow coherent logic as it does in the stories you heard as a child. The worldbuilding was well-done, but sparse, although the scarcity of information often added to the mystique of the world. The villain of the novel channeled David Bowie's performance in Labyrinth. On top of that the prose was beautiful.
On the negative side, some of the characters only showed up long enough to leave. My favorite, a boisterous fairy warrior, vanishes from the book in the blink of an eye. Another issue, and this is largely a pet peeve, was the name of the male lead, Him. Seeing "Him" as the subject of a sentence just kept setting off my grammar alarm, and drew me out of the story. It's petty, but it bothered me.
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