The Steerswoman's Road

Ended a little abruptly, but happily I had Book 2 ready to go.

Hmm. This is a bit of an oddity. At times it feels like an exam question (If Tom throws a ball at 5m/s from a height of 2m, where does the ball land?) punctuated with random throwaway violence and unrealistic dialogue. There seems to be a nugget of an interesting premise, but very little is explained by the end of the first book. I am sort of tempted to read the next one, if only to confirm that the story is heading in the direction it appears to be heading, but I'm going to check the reviews first in the hope things improve...

(update: the reviews appear to indicate that the second book gets better, so onto the TBR list it goes...)

Recommended very effusively by a college friend. I read it and I think it's... fine! I liked it well enough, I'm not sure I see what got him so excited about the series. I like that the heroine is just a smart lady, and not secretly a princess or a sorceress or anything like that.

A dangerous gal
asks way too many questions
even knows her math.

Now that I have finished this book, I love it. This is the first book in a series about the Steerswoman Rowan. After the first 50 pages I was not sure if I was going to finish it. I then went and looked at others' reviews. One secret revealed by another reviewer made me want to continue the book.

I started the book because a reviewer had compared the steerswomen to librarians. I would not have used that analogy. I would have compared a steerswoman to a high level analyst. She always considers all the facts she has access to in making decisions. I found the book slow going, but I am glad, and I am going to keep at it.

This book got under my skin. As I read, I liked it more and more. It was slow starting, but it may get added to my list of favorite books. The characters are constantly looking around them and smelling the air and trying to reason through what their senses and minds tell them is happening around them.

This book contains many details of life that occur in between plot action. Fictional story-telling, usually, is filled with a series of dramatic points where tension is constructed and resolved. Real life is different, our lives do not build to dramatic points on a regular basis. This book contains much more of real life that occurs between dramatic points.