It felt like the author couldn’t decide who Magdalen was. I kept hoping Magdalen would be like Ani from The Goose Girl who had a horse, whom she adored, and who actually connected to the geese and befriended the servants, instead of look down upon them, but that never happened with Magdalen. See, she wants to help her people but she doesn’t seem to have a problem looking down on servants and animals. She was contradictory in the worst sense of the word. Maybe it was too much screen page time, I don’t know. I liked Magdalen in The Beautiful Pretender but in this book, she seemed to have lost that vital whatever it was that made her an interesting character in the other book. The characters were all flat, the plot was all flat, and the writing was all flat and I don’t just mean flat because they were all squished in between the pages of a 300-page book. I really, really tried but I could not get into this book. I liked the latter the best out all three because of the interesting premise but it still wasn’t the epitome of a great story. I even checked out two of her other books, The Captive Maiden and The Beautiful Pretender. But, being the mature person that I am, I reeled in my despair and decided to give Melanie Dickerson a fair trial. I can’t even find the right words to convey my disappointment, seeing as The Goose Girl is one of my favorite books and this one didn’t even come close to it. It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t what I was expecting. However, as I read through the first chapter, I felt a little cheated. You see, I didn’t really know the author and so thought I was getting a book like Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl. I didn’t find The Noble Servant to my liking and I feel like I have to justify my reasoning, seeing as there are many positive reviews for this book.įirst of all, I think I may have started reading it on the wrong foot and with completely skewed expectations.

Now, I hate writing scathing reviews almost as much as I like reading them but I’ve learned that in life, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I Received this ARC from Thomas Nelson Fiction via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.Īnd trust me, this review will be brutally honest.

The noble servant melanie dickerson