Book Labyrinth: The Forest of Adventures (Knight Trilogy #1) by Katie M. John

Release Date: October 26, 2010
Publisher: Little Bird Publishing House
Pages: 384
Review Source: eBook from publisher for honest review

Synopsis: (from Goodreads)
For seventeen year old Mina Singer, falling in love with an Arthurian Knight on a white horse was never part of the plan - especially being that she's an ordinary college girl living in the twenty first century.
As Mina finds herself catapulted into a land she believed only existed in the bedtime stories of her childhood, she soon discovers that Fairyland is not quite as innocent as she imagined.

The question is...who will come out alive?

Haunting, beautiful and sexy, The Forest of Adventures, is a dark romantic quest into the land of true and forbidden love.

My Thoughts:
The premise of this book gave me high hopes for the adventures that would happen within its pages, but unfortunately I was disappointed. The book starts off with Mina doubting her relationship with her long time boyfriend Sam and feeling smothered by him simply because she sees a hot guy. Enter Blake, who is apparently so perfect and gorgeous he fails to get any type of personality beyond the cliche of the tortured bad boy who is actually a Nice Guy. Things change so quickly between Mina and Sam that their whole relationship is pretty much pointless. Sam is disposed of very conveniently early on, and I’m left to wonder if the book would have been a lot better without his character. Sam is really only the catalyst to keep Mina and Blake apart a bit longer and to distance Mina from her friends since they disapprove of Blake. The whole “relationship” between Mina and Blake is just so quick and based on nothing, that I couldn’t even appreciate the few moments that were cute. “Love” based on destiny and the fact that a couple HAS to be together because it was written that way really offends me. What about free will and choice?

Who is Mina? I’m not quite sure. Despite the fact that she is narrating the book, I feel like I have no clue who she is and what she is interested in, besides Blake. Sometimes I didn’t really know what was happening at all, in fact. What exactly IS The Realm? I actually don’t even have a clue. There’s all this mysticism going on, with some immortal characters from the past and some that are mortal, but somehow related to people from Arthurian times. I just have absolutely no clue how it all works. It’s fine to leave a bit of mystery, but when the reader doesn’t understand anything about the world you’ve built (or failed to build), I think that’s a problem.

There is a lot of foreshadowing of doom and gloom at the beginning of the book which is annoying, especially because those levels of said doom and gloom didn’t really seem to appear. Yes, bad stuff happened. But apocalyptic, everything is doomed levels of gloom? Not so much. Everything in the book seems a bit disjointed, in fact. There are random details about the background characters thrown in just for the heck of it, it seems, because they definitely didn’t serve any purpose to the greater story. Add in some grammar mistakes and major formatting issues with the eBook version of the novel, and it leads me to believe there was very little proofreading.

The last fifty pages of the book are infinitely better and more interesting than the rest of the book, and the ending feels like an entirely different book with how intriguing and well written it is. When I finished reading the book I admit that I was curious about what will happen next, but not enough to pick up the next book. The deficiencies that plague the majority of this story will definitely prevent me from reading on in this saga.

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