Adventures and Adversities Review

One day Alditha is content living with her family, the next she is taking her friend's place to serve at the king’s castle. Her father's final instructions, to keep smiling and to do what is right, will be harder to live out than she ever imagined. She will face a royal nephew who delights in making people miserable, an angry servant girl who will stop at nothing to get what she wants, and noblemen who plot murder. Will she be able to keep the promise she made to her father? Will she find the faith she longs for during all her Adventures and Adversities?
--From Amazon.com

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I very much enjoyed this book. I liked it even better than Sarah Holman's Destiny Trilogy, though I enjoyed the Destiny Trilogy immensely.

I'll start off with the cons, to get them over with. The only cons I found in this book were technical ones. First, there are a lot of typos. Second, the cover images for the paperback could have stood to be at a higher resolution. Third, there were some errors with the interior formatting, the most major being that the page headers were not removed from the first page of every chapter as they are in traditionally published books when the chapter starts on a new page.

As for the story, I loved it! It felt a lot more original to me than the Destiny Trilogy. It has the feel of historical fiction, even though it is set in a fictional country. The story is sweet, and sometimes heartrending. There were parts that weren't terribly unpredictable, but with this story, it didn't matter. I still stayed up late into the night to finish it on the same day I began it. A lot of time is covered in the book, but it is done well. The characters also deserve mention. They were all very well developed. As I am struggling with the character development in my current work in progress, it amazed me to see how the characters' personalities came through in every bit of dialogue. I loved Will, Alditha, and Eleanor best of all, though of those three, Will is probably my favorite.

I definitely recommend this book.