Anathema starts out with the main girl Reychel, very cool spelling btw, a slave in a castle on a day that something terrible is going to happen, and her best friend has mysteriously vanished. I loved the beginning of this book. It had such a great set up to be an intense book with lots of deep plot elements. I commend Jensen on creating such a good set up, but unfortunately during the story things fell apart for me.
The exposition was great, and I liked how each character was introduced with time to get to know and understand them, the description was vivid and concise. At some point a little past the half-way point it seemed like someone dropped the 'five minutes left' sign and the book just blasted through the ending half. It seemed very rushed at times, which took away from the overall book.
*Spoiler Alert*
Some points during the book there were several pretty obvious hints at what would happen, like her being the cloud prophet. Then they threw at us that she was the daughter of her slave owner, without having any hints of that at all. It came so quickly that it seemed forced and glossed over.
I also was a little shocked at the fact that she was willing to go into a castle, risk the lives of all the people who had been kind to her including a friend who was taken captive from his family, but she got offended by a soldier killing an enemy while raiding the castle to save her. Then they all ran away because she threw a fit that they used violence. It seemed like this was done to force a love triangle because now she's mad at her boyfriend. It just didn't seem to fit and left me confused.
Overall a good book, better than most in the Epic Fantasy box set.
3.5 stars.