DNF Early Review – Child of a Hidden Sea by A.M. Dellamonica (2/5 stars)

Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Size: 336 pages
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0765334497
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: eGalley from NetGalley.com
Rating: 2/5 stars

I got a copy of this book through NetGalley.com. Prior to this I read Dellamonica’s Indigo Springs series and really enjoyed how creative that story was. I struggled to read this book for quite a while, I was determined to finish it over this last weekend…and after struggling some more, I finally gave up.

Twenty four year old Sophie has finally tracked down her birth mother…okay she’s been maybe stalking her mother a bit. When Sophie’s aunt is attacked Sophie saves her, but finds herself in the world of Stormwrack. Stormwrack is a world covered mostly by water, with politics and creatures beyond Sophie’s imagination. Sophie is discovering that somehow she is tied to this other world and is struggling to figure out how.

I really really struggled with this book. I got through the first 40% or so and then just gave up. It’s not that the book is incredibly poorly written or anything, it’s just that I couldn’t engage with the story or characters. Things are move very slowly for the first 40% of the book and a lot of names are thrown at you without much context..

This is a very typical “girl runs into a gate to another world and is displaced there only to find she has family ties there” type of fantasy. The other world has a lot of ocean and not much land at all, so there is a lot of time on ships and going from island to island. I am also not huge on reading about sea travel, so that was another strike against this book for me.

Sophie ends up embroiled in a lot of politics right from the moment she steps into this new land and it is up to her to figure out what is going on. She gets herself into even deeper trouble when she accidentally inherits a position of power in Stormwrack.

As mentioned above I stopped reading this about 40% of the way through, so I can only comment on that portion of the story. I didn’t care about the characters, had trouble imagining the world, struggled with all of the names, and was just generally frustrated. I have a lot of books to read, so I don’t have time to read ones that cause me this much frustration. Technically the writing was sound.

Overall I did not like this book. It’s not that this is an awful story, it’s just that I had one of heck of a time paying attention, engaging, and focusing on it. So I finally set it aside.