Book Review: Woven

TITLE: Woven
AUTHOR: Michael Jensen and David Powers King
PUBLISHED: January 27th, 2015
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Fantasy
PREMISE: A spoiled princess must help a ghost find out why he was murdered.
MY REVIEW: I wanted to like this one more then I did. If I could rate it just on world-building and great premise alone, it'd get a full five stars from me. Unfortunately...too many little issues got in the way and that interfered with my enjoyment.
One issue was writing. It was...very tell instead of show. Also some of the dialogue confused me. One minute, they're speaking ye olde medieval type language. The next they were using modern slang. That was strange and kept jerking me out of the book and also made me notice plausibility flaws as well as how flat the characters all were. All of this would be fine too if there wasn't slut shaming on top of that. Literally, the moment the boys mother discovers a girl turned down the option of having a (forced mind you) kiss of her son, she calls her a whore! Just...what? Oh, and then the girl who has a crush on the guy calls the princess a whore as well because she was, I don't know there. Oh, and then when said guy discovers princess was meeting up (just meeting up, no sex) with the guy she had a crush on he goes "oh, I guess you're a whore after all". Um...NO NO NO. Stop this nonsense, authors. NOW. You can just really tell guys wrote this (and yes, I'm aware that one of them is gay. Gay men can be as sexist as everyone else without meaning to be). This stuff annoyed me so much that I started noticing all the other flaws in the book and that basically made it so I couldn't enjoy it, despite the somewhat awesome premise.
If you don't mind slut shaming on top of flat characters then I guess this book is okay. If nothing else, it's a debut that gets the job done. I however have gotten a point that I can't really tolerate slut shaming in books so I couldn't really enjoy this one that much.
WHO SHOULD READ: fantasy fans, those able to tolerate little flaws
MY RATING: Three out of Five okay but needs work stories