Twisted Kingdom

I was looking for books to buy one day and came across Thief with no Shadows by Emily Gee. The back blurb sounded good and there was a quote saying something like "great romance story!" ... and so I bought it. I guess I'm easy LOL

Thief with no Shadows by Emily Gee: 2.5/5
published by Solaris in April 2007

Melke is a wraith and so has the ability to become invisible. As a result, wraiths are usually persecuted because they are great thieves and spies. Melke has promised her mother that she would never become a thief; however, she breaks that promess in order to save her younger brother, Hantje, from the fire-breathing salamanders. So in exchange for her brother, she must steal a necklace from the sal Vere.

As soon as Bastien sal Vere is aware of the theft, he goes after Melke, but he is too late. Furious, he forces Melke to steal back the necklace. See, what Melke didn't know was that the necklace was made up of tears of psaaron, some sea creature, and it was the solution to a curse... and so Bastien desperately needs it in order to free himself and his sister.

My thoughts: I was quite disappointed in the book, not only because the great romance story wasn't there, but also because I think that the world building was lacking and there wasn't enough character development. Let's start with the world building... I thought that I miss a chapter or two where things were explained. There are 4 "paranormal" creatures and they're pretty much feared and each of them use sex in a certain way... and that was the only thing that was explained. There wasn't much about the geography or even day to day life or what kind of powers/abilities people could have. I mean, Bastien can talk to dogs in his mind and Liana, his younger sister, has a healing gift... but how rare are those powers... I have no idea. So my thoughts are that the author had this storyline all figure out, but not the world building and so she figured out she could still write the book. It's just seems to me that the book was lacking.

Now, the characters... well perhaps it wasn't a lack of development, but it was hard to be attached to them, to care. I think that the majority of them were uni-dimensional and that's too bad... cos it was very difficult to like them. Melke seems to passive and Bastien was a real jerk in my opinion... which is why it I didn't see any romance between them at all. Basically, Bastien despises wraith and he's very angry at Melke and so, he treats her really badly. I don't often dislike heroes in my books, but in this case, I really had difficulty to see a good side to Bastien. I just wanted him to get over his dislike and suddenly, he was already in love... I didn't buy it...

The idea and storyline wasn't bad, but the book would definitively have been better if it was a bit more developed.... because of this, the flow of the book was akward.