The Beholder

The Beholder by Anna Bright
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received an ARC of this book from Edelweiss.
I am not really sure how to review this book. The author clearly has a very good imagination, and is also very clever to weave in various fairy tale/mythological/folklore influences. But the plot was disjointed and the characters were weak.
Selah is a girl who is forced by her evil step-mother (yes, that's right) to venture out on the ship "The Beholder" to "court" various princes from other countries to marry. She does not want to leave her sickly father or her homeland of Potomac (somewhere analogous to the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S.?) and travel to "England" and then to a Scandinavian-like kingdom to meet her suitors. (There are also other suitors on her list, but we only get through two of them in this book.)
While this premise seemed very interesting to me, actually reading it was not so interesting. There were so many fairy tale references thrown in, I was not sure what was supposed to be a coincidental reference that the reader was supposed to notice and say something like, "Oh, yes, isn't it clever that the Protocol Officer is named after the author of Cinderella?" or if Selah and her shipmates were actually IN some version of a fairy tale. I kept getting confused. The geographical regions also confused me. Was it REALLY supposed to be England? Or Norway? Or Russia? And the time period also left me wondering. There were very few "technological" advances (Selah acted amazed at a radio), and there were no cars, airplanes, electricity, or anything of that nature, and yet many "modern" words were used, and at one point Selah mentions playing basketball. I could not get a grip on what was going on with the setting.
The characters also seemed flat. If I met Selah in person, she would no doubt get on my nerves. She was either crying, pouting, acting put-upon, worrying, or being annoying. I would not want to spend any time with her. Then she "falls in love" with various and sundry boys, alternately feeing guilty about holding their hands or declaring that they will be her whole world. I wanted to shake her.
This book could have been really awesome, and tried to be really awesome, but it was just kind of disappointing. I think if it could have been tightened up, polished, and developed better, it would have been a great book.


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