Amaranth enchantment by Julie berry

This is exactly the sort of book I should have loved. Plucky girl overcoming hardship, clever rogue, handsome prince, evil government official, stranded alien, interesting alternate London and England sort of setting... But it comes out feeling flat and dumbed down, and I just didn't like reading it. It felt like a problem: she wanted the characters to do this and this and this, but they wanted to do their own thing, and so she forced them, and sections of the dialog and narrative are so forced I just hated reading them. And throughout the whole thing, I kept wanting to edit it hard- core, until the end, when I wanted to just rewrite the whole thing. It feels like it got lost in it's own setting sometimes, and like it was extremely dumbed down other times, like the whole book didn't trust preteen girls to understand things, while the plot demanded that the lead go to jail and face the gallows.

I can't abide being ken down to, even when I'm not the target audience, and if I was nine or ten, I'd still want more from this book. ::sigh:: it really does ace a great set up, too.