I've been aware of this one for a while due to a certain friend's constant championing of it, and expected that I would probably enjoy it - which I did, but with some substantial reservations.
I give Dart-Thornton credit for trying to do something new with the fantasy thing - she does succeed in imagining and presenting a rich, impressively original world in which to place her characters, and there are many nice touches to make even a fairly jaded reader of the genre like myself smile. But there are a few pretty serious problems with this book, as far as I'm concerned, which prevented me from really getting into it (and which will probably dissuade me from reading any further into the series)...
The most striking of these problems is how over-written the novel is. Descriptive writing is all very well, but description - and creative, profuse use of language - needs to be balanced with an understanding of when it's best merely to suggest, or to invoke, and The Ill-Made Mute contains far too much of the former and precious little of the latter; as a result, reading Dart-Thornton's prose can be very frustrating. A second, related problem is that there's no real sense of narrative to the book - the story follows a fairly standard 'quest for self-understanding/fulfilment' arc, occurring concurrently with a physical journey through perilous lands, but things just seem to happen one after the other, without any real feeling of progression, development or context. And third (this being related to that second), the novel isn't epic enough for my tastes - it all takes place at the micro level of Imrhien's adventures, with larger-scale happenings being only hinted at as taking place around the margins, and there's no 'sweep' to events.
