Farro and Sulfer, by Arreana, took me off-guard. Despite some enthusiastic reviews, this book did not look promising. The cover art screams "self-published", and, for some reason, the first few pages just seemed overwrought to me. But, since I was reading the first chapter free anyway, I kept on reading to the next few pages and ended up totally hooked.
So, the story starts from the POV of a girl who has been tortured (literally and brutally) for some time, but she soon finds herself in a new circumstance. The first book is a bit of a palace intrigue, and the second book has a quest structure.
You soon find out that this is a fantasy with a clearly developed, but not cliched, setting. It felt a little ancient-Egypt-meets-medieval-Europe to me, and the author does a good job of unfolding the world without a lot of info-dumps.
It was not a perfect book. The dialog was reasonable, but not anything I'm going to quote or especially remember. Sometimes it seemed like smart bad guys ignored potentially effective manipulation/deceit tactics in favor of torture-and-violence just to make the heroine especially martyred. And I had to use some suspension of disbelief on the magic system.
But...but...despite its flaws, I had a fantastic time reading this story.
