I received this book for free in a giveaway promotion. My thoughts are my own, and I have not been compensated for them.

I quit this book at 13% in. The love interests haven't even met each other yet. I believe Ms. Walker was going for a detail rich environment with her writing style, but she went about it the wrong way. Every noun, and I do mean all of them, had an adjective. Alliteration was abused. The characters were defining foreign words that they know and comprehend, in their internal dialogue. It was clunky and bothersome. I tried to brush past it, but after a character was mentioned for the 6th time with their entire title instead of just their name, I gotta bow out.

This is my first foray into the works of King. If I understand correctly, this isn't exactly representative of his larger body of works, so I'm reserving any judgement outside of this particular tale.

As far as the story itself, I was a bit underwhelmed, but I also think that may have had something to do with the writing style, which may have had something to do with the landscape of the story. There's really only 4 "events" in the story, two of which happen in retrospect. That's not a complaint, as this is a fairly short book and there's no requirement for action sequences. It lends itself to the dry, arid wasteland our characters inhibit for the majority of the book. Which is how I felt about the prose. Dry and arid. There's no coddling here. No language that softens the environment or the events within. There are no wasted words and if there's poetry, it's Bukowski and not Whitman. It honestly reminds me of Sunday afternoons when my dad would watch Westerns on the TV. I could never stand to be in there for long because everything was brown. Brown as far as the eye could see, for hours on end. It left my imagination wanting, and maybe that's the best way to sum this up.

I'll give book two a go - but if I'm still in the same place about the story as I am now, that will likely be the end of the Dark Tower for me.