Fifteen-year-old Dashti, sworn to obey her sixteen-year-old mistress, the Lady Saren, shares Saren's years of punishment locked in a tower, then brings her safely to the lands of her true love, where both must hide who they are as they work as kitchen maids.
Book of a Thousand Days is geared towards a younger audience than the Books of Bayern, and it demonstrates this with simple language, a straightforward plot, and flat characters–all of which combine to make the novel a little dull for readers able to follow something much more complicated. The journal format is an interesting choice for Hale, and she manages to make use of it on a couple occasions by having Dashti add notes “later” or write very short humorous entries when little happens on a particular day, but overall it just adds to the sense that the tale is very limited in scope. There are also some illustrations when Dashti writes “And the flap looked like this,” but they are mainly of characters and random things and do not really add much to the reader’s visualization of the tale. Book of a Thousand Days might be worth an afternoon if one has run out of other books to read, but there is no need to rush for it and I would not recommend spending the money to purchase it.
This review was also posted at Pages Unbound Book Reviews.
Reading updates
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1 June, 2011:
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1 June, 2011:
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