I suspect there's a good story here but I'm only going to find out what it is if someone makes a TV series.
I can't cope with the text. It doesn't work and every time it fails. I'm pulled away from the story.
What finally made me give in was a chapter in which our heroine goes to a fancy auction to make a bid on an important artefact. The words used to describe the people in the crowd and our heroine's reaction to them left me baffled.
It started with describing a man in the crowd by saying:
"He looked deceptively strong."
What does that mean? If he looks strong then where's the deception? If he's stronger than he looks how can you tell you're being deceived only by looking at him?
Then I got the reaction of the crowd to a dominant male described as:
"Those around him gave him a discreet, but wide berth. Several paces around him remained empty."
What part of giving someone a wide berth is discrete? How do you do that?
Then I got this description of the route down into the auction hall:
"The stairs were half that of the ones we had entered,"
I think the author means to say there were half as many stairs but WHY NOT SAY THAT.
A paragraph later, as the crowd starts to move to the auction hall, I got:
"I made no move as I turned back to the man who had mistaken me."
How do you do that? How do you simultaneously make no move and turn back?
What finally broke my will to read were two encounters within a few pages, with the word "Belaying":
"Faint creases marred the corners of his eyes, belying that he was no stranger to laughter."
and
"No one stood near the book now, belying that they had recorded the video prior to auction."
This made me want to give the author my impersonation of Mandy Patinkin in "The Princess Bride" and say:
I want to read a book to enjoy it, not to have it keep summoning my inner-snark, so I'm going to let *Unchained* remain unfinished.
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