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Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Fantasy/romance. We begin with our orphan heroine awaiting execution for killing a general's son. She is reprieved instead to be the military dictator's food taster, and we follow her through various spy adventures, discovering her heritage and family, and eventually to magic school.

I read the first two books of this trilogy, and now I'm done, I think for good. The first book was entertaining enough; it's one of those where I would write a whole long list of things that were silly or slapdash about it, but end every sentence with "but I liked it anyway." I'll skip most of it, except for the thing where Snyder keeps putting chapter breaks in the middle of scenes at dramatic moments in that way where you could basically replace each with "dun-dun-dun!" and get the same effect (not what she's going for, mind you).

Except then we got to the second book, and I realized halfway through that what it most strongly evoked was Harry Potter Mary Sue fanfic. And not the hilarious kind either, but the kind where Mary Sue has extra special magic powers and extra special tutoring, and people irrationally hate her for being herself, but she proves she's the best by selfless sacrifice. Yawn. Other people with better writing could carry that, but the nicest thing to be said for Snyder's prose is that it's bland. Until we get to the sex scenes, where it, um, stops being bland and starts being a bunch of other things, none of them good.

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