Book review
Daaaaang! Sure, there are some problems, but The Huntress of Thornbeck Forest was a seriously good read. This review technically does include spoilers, but I am not hiding it because the spoilers are very minor (e.g., ones you would see from reading the back cover).
First, there’s the speed at which Melanie Dickerson writes. She makes one day go on for chapters, and we get plenty of dialogue, but it is still never slow. What is talked about or what happens often turns out to be necessary, and if it isn’t, it’s a great experience of ‘spending time’ with the characters. 🙂
Speaking of which, I liked both of the main characters, Odette and Jorgen, but Odette especially. She was a female Robin Hood, yet not a man in a woman’s body. She was her own self–sassy, kind, smart, passionate, and strong-headed. With an inner battle, she was multi-layered as well. As for how she looked, she was not your typical delicate pixie girl. Rather, although Jorgen (and many other men) found her beautiful, she was taller and more broad-shouldered than most other women. I found that little detail cool, for it’s a reminder that you don’t have to look the way models do to be pretty. We also had a couple of feminist-like points as well, but they were not at all preachy.
The book was less predictable than Dickerson’s 11-book Hagenheim series, too. The books seemed to always have kidnapping, a snobbish rich girl the main female protagonist opposed, and a creepy dude that either wanted to capture the main female protagonist or sexually abuse her (or both), but this book had none of those. It was so refreshing!
Interestingly, it had no villains, either. Oh, yes, it certainly had antagonists–people that were unkind, cruel, or backstabbing and the main characters opposed. But there was not a main person that they all had to fight against for the greater good.
Of course, like I said at the beginning, it wasn’t perfect. One, although Odette discovered a horrible secret, I did not get to see and/or experience her journey in uncovering it. All I got was her reaction–not it slowly dawning on her, not her heart pounding ferociously as she began to put the pieces together, not struggling with how she would handle it, but what she said afterwards. Two, there was a pretty ridiculous something that happened two-thirds or so into the book. It made a couple of characters look like bumbling idiots and made the scenario come across as cheesy and forced. Three, there were several plot points of convenience; i.e., the right thing just happened to occur at the right time. Not as in the characters got lucky, but the author avoided reality in order to speed up or slow down the story. Four, it felt that parts of the Bible and talking about God were simply thrown in here and there; there wasn’t a main message or growth in the Lord. Five, although the book was more unpredictable because Dickerson avoided her cliches, a couple of ‘plot twists’ were predictable. Six… it was kept as clean as possible, but there was a brothel. Thankfully, this took up a small fraction of the book, and the main characters did nothing immoral there.
This book was so stinkin’ good… maybe my favorite of Melanie Dickerson’s yet. Despite my paragraph about the book’s flaws being so large, the good far outweighs the bad. I have to give it 5/5 stars and highly recommend it!
- Goodreads rating – 3.84
- REVIEW – FC Marshall