I am a fan of Card's Ender series, but I couldn't warm to this book, an early effort and his first try at fantasy. It's just too gruesome. It has a fairy tale feel in its rather distant, stilted omniscient point of view, written more as a series of vignettes then a sustained narrative. When we think "fairy tale" thanks to Disney we often think of childish, sweet and romantic stuff, where there's a nice bright line between villains and heroes. Of course a lot of the original material isn't that way--in the Grimm Brother's version of Cinderella the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to try to make the glass slipper fit and in the end both they and the stepmother are punished by having their eyes pecked out by crows. Well, this isn't the Disney sort of fairy tale, that's for certain. Early on the graphic rape of a twelve-year-old girl as thousands look on is unsparingly depicted. No one is innocent, no one is good--or even completely evil here. One "hero" of this book is the rapist, and the victim's revenge is cruel beyond belief. I'm not saying by the way this isn't a book worth reading, that I can't understand why for some it might appeal, but this is just too brutal for me.
