
The Compass Rose by Gail Dayton
I simply could not finish Gail Dayton's The Compass Rose (and have already donated it to my public library). It begins adequately and has decent world-building, but about halfway in (once the strong-yet-unremarkable protagonist, Kallista, and company start toward the capital city) it sinks into a nauseating quagmire of romantic pseudo-plots and issues. The scenes are poorly paced, and for no apparent reason (other than weak attempts at creating tension), chapters begin and end in the middle of the same scene. Most glaringly, the writing is at best pedestrian and, at its worst, contains some of the most awful sentences I can recall.
An example from p. 220: "[His] hips bucked, his tip just nudging her entrance, and they both hissed with the feel of it." (Note that neither character being described is a snake-person. Also, how could neither the author nor edit... Read More