The Ill-made Mute

Gets the "Overrated Books With Undeserved Hype" as the book did get more praise than it rightly deserved. I'd also tack on the "Terribly Written Books" category too. However, in this case, she's got fantastic writing skills, but her plot, story, and characters are about as thin as a piece of paper. This is the one shining example I can give that good fabulous prose doesn't necessarly make a good book -- not by a long shot.Probably the worst example of literary pretentiousness by any author. These books are so thick with forgotten English words that you practically need a thesaurus to translate her works.Hidden among all those self-indulgent, pretentious celtic descriptions, there may be a story somewhere, but if it's there, I haven't found it. Perhaps I wasn't using the right thesaurus?If an author can have sex with a thesaurus, Celcia Thorn Darton does so with unabated passion. Her descriptions border on the raise-your-eyes ridonculous. Not only is she content with plowing through the thesaurus to find the most obscure and forgotten English words-- as if trying to penetrate her opaque prose isn't difficult enough -- but she readily throws in an abundance of made-up words as well. Good luck at trying to guess which ones are made up and which are real!The whole plot grinds to a halt every few pages as the author gets lost in the pleasure of describing...well...everything. What kind of horses to the breed of horse to the type of trees that are in the castle. Then it was the spoons, the forks, the clothing every character wears, the weather, the varying shades of shadow found in the cracks between cobblestones in a castle, the color of every strange hair on a head. Then the plot continues for a few more pages before grinding to a stop once again while the author goes off on a descriptive tangent, yet again.The sad thing is that at the very beginning of the book, you feel like a new fantasy voice has arrived -- the descriptions are lovely, the story is promising, and the character comes off as potentially interesting. But then reality quickly sets in as you realize the author is writing her very own mishmash, chick-lit wish-fullfilment, celtic mythology, and her not-so-secret fantasy about male-model loving.Oh man, let's not even get into the actual characterization here. Well, maybe just a little, because it's so god-awfully bad. The main character in the classic cliche wakes up with no memories, has no voice and looks like something dredged up from the set of Tales from the Crypt. Naturally, what should this heroine do but set out on a wild quest to reclaim what she's lost and discover who she really is. Everyone is mean and vicious to her because she's god-awful uuugly, except for the main love interest who, despite disliking ugly things, somehow still likes her. Of course, being an ugly girl Imrhein spends most of the novel in a sulky state because everyone doesn't appreciate her for her...personality (welcome to the real world, girly). During her quest to regain what she's lost, it becomes sadly apparent that she's more interested in the quest for a pretty face than actually finding her voice; vanity rules the day yet again -- no moral didactic here.And of course is it shocking that when Imrhein regains what she's lost that she naturally has the face and body of a goddess. A shock, no?Another annoying thing about this book/series is that the author is dead set on rekindling the forgotten fires of Celtic mythology and is not so subtle about it by pretty much stuffing Celtic folklore tales down our throats time and time again; this comes off in the descriptions she writes, and in the the minor stories in which pretty much every goddamn character in the novel seems obligated to prattle on about fairy tales.I'm not going to dispute that Cecilia Dart-Thornton doesn't write beautifully -- she's got the gift of literary gab and she can write wonderful, beautiful descriptions. But she's way too full of herself and her abuse of the thesaurus comes off as a showy way to impress us all with how talented a writer she just really is. Combine the nearly impenetrable prose with a two-dimensional heroine who's only real goal is to become beautiful again, and a smothering amount of Celtic folklore and you have a very bad book.Geez, the woman should be arrested for dictionary abuse. You could easily cut out half the book by ripping out the thesauri